Reckless copyright bill a threat to creative industries
Murky ‘fair use’ clause means content producers can be widely plagiarised, robbing them of income and the country of original work
The department of trade and industry’s reckless pursuit of the Copyright Amendment Bill will have disastrous consequences for SA creative industries. Due to the unspecified “fair use” clauses in the current bill, artists will have no protection from rampant plagiarism, which favours those who seek to exploit original content without creating it or investing in it. At face value, amendments to the bill imply “fair use” of work in the pursuit of education or dissemination of information. However, the bill goes too far and will ultimately work against SA content producers. In the publishing industry alone, PwC’s economic impact assessment projects a 30% reduction of sales and a loss of jobs equating to R2.1bn per annum. A recent symposium by the Academic Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of SA (Anfasa) at the University of Witwatersrand showed the frustration felt by scholarly writers and publishers over the bill. With the marked global prevalence of predatory journals and the recently ...
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