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The African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project’s researchers are not the first to recognise the problem of the lack of evidence for copyright policymaking, or the urgent need for a better understanding of the impacts of copyright and other intellectual property (IP) laws, policies and regulations on everyday life issues, such as on access to educational and learning materials. However, it is no exaggeration to say that the ACA2K project is the first to deploy a sophisticated interdisciplinary collaborative research methodology and to generate on-the-ground empirical evidence on the impact of copyright on a particular sector across a group of countries. As early as 2002, the UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights had observed that ‘WIPO ... should give explicit recognition to both the benefits and costs of IP protection and the corresponding need to adjust domestic regimes in developing countries to ensure that the costs do not outweigh the benefits’.1 In the ensuing debates, including the debates between 2004 and 2007 at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) on establishing a ‘development agenda’ for the organisation, new terminology has emerged to describe the optimum IP policy for developing countries. We have increasingly heard or read phrases like: ‘IP is not an end in itself,’ ‘one size does not fit all,’ ‘developing countries need flexibilities and policy space,’ ‘IP rules must take into account the levels of development of each country,’ ‘IP is a cross-cutting issue,’ and so forth. These phrases have become mantras in IP policymaking and scholarship and have had important catalytic effects for international initiatives, such as the WIPO development agenda. But what do these phrases and terminology mean, for example, in the area of copyright?

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