Out of Africa Something New - and Bad

Despite the fact that South Africa is at the forefront of open source usage, it seems to be taking a very bad turn as far as open knowledge is concerned:

The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.

This stems from a mistaken belief that:

the best way to get research re-used for the benefit of the economy is to lock it down, and award a monopoly to one person, rather than opening it to everyone.

This could set South African research back seriously.