Dear Portfolio Committee On Trade and Industry,

Dear Ms Fubbs,

I refer to previous emails in the above regard, and look forward to your response.

I also refer you to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group’s report on the Copyright Amendment Bill : subcommittee deliberations dated 18 April 2018, and in particular to the following paragraph “Three issues were to be added to the recommendations of the Farlam Commission. The current legislation would, therefore, also address the issues of hearing-impaired people, librarians and museum staff, and the Department of Trade and Industry would select a third issue, but one that was not contentious so that the legislation could be fast-tracked”.

Please advise urgently why the above recommendations exclude education and research, archives, galleries, blind and other disabled persons (the 2017 Bill addressed ALL disabilities) and digital issues?

- Surely these provisions cannot be categorised as ‘contentious’ as they apply to all information users, including authors, creators and musicians, educators, researchers, learners, etc., particularly in a digital world. It would indeed be a sad day in South Africa if these provisions, and in particular, education, were to be treated as ‘contentious’, in a country with such low levels of literacy and where 30% is an accepted pass mark for matric subjects, and where the whole country was rocked by violent protests by the #FeesMustFall campaign, because of demands for access to higher education. Without access to information and learning materials through these exceptions in the Bill, the serious educational problems in South Africa will be further exacerbated.
- The Copyright law has not been changed for the educational or library sectors since 1978 (40 years ago). It has NO provisions for disabilities and obviously does not address the digital environment.
- These provisions in the Bill were drawn from the Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and the Africa Group’s proposals for a Treaty on Limitations and Exceptions (strongly supported by South Africa at WIPO), as well as the eIFL model copyright law, an expansion of the WIPO model copyright law, and empirical research done in South Africa and regionally, so they cannot be contentious issues.
- If an argument is made that publishers or authors will suffer economically from these exceptions, please be aware that the 26 public funded tertiary institutions spend millions of rands each year on print and electronic resources and copyright fees. Just a random sample I took from 10 public funded institutions shows that just for 2018, estimated budgets for subscriptions for printed and electronic resources (excluding binding, interlibrary loans and other expenses) total R868 721 574 and the total for copyright fees via blanket and transactional licences (using mainly already paid-for subscription materials) exceeds R19 524 024 based on 2017 expenditure, or 2018 estimates. These subscriptions and copyright fees are paid on an annual basis. If we had to add the estimated expenditure for the remaining 16 public funded institutions, these amounts would be astronomical.

Please confirm that all the above-mentioned provisions will remain in the Bill, and that outstanding digital issues such as text and data mining, data issues, safe harbours, etc. will also be addressed expeditiously. Passing a phased Bill is short-sighted and will not address the major problems experienced by all stakeholders right now in a digital world.


Thank you,
Denise Nicholson
Official Copyright Representative for: Library and Information Association of SA (LIASA); The Ministry of Arts and Culture’s National Council for Libraries and Information Services, and its Legal Deposit Committee, and Advisory Expert for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)’s Committee for Copyright & Other Legal Matters (CLM).

Denise Nicholson (Mrs), BA HDip Lib(Unisa); LLM(Wits)
Scholarly Communications Librarian
Scholarly Communications & Copyright Services Office
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
The Library, Private Bag X1, WITS, 2050, South Africa
Tel. No. + 27 11 717-1929 : Mobile: +27 83 4422572 (for urgent calls only)
LibGuides - http://libguides.wits.ac.za/prf.php?account_id=25548
http://www.wits.ac.za/library
http://africanlii.org/newsletter/copyright-a2k-issues
http://africanlii.org/newsletter/legal-deposit-south-africa
orcid.org/0000-0002-8591-3276

“Information is the currency of democracy.” (Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)).”