LAST week, acting judge Daniel Berger delivered a ruling with grim implications for one of the last few institutions of democracy standing — the media. The case began in 2014 after Naspers’s Fin24 had taken the notion of a “free press” a tad too literally and had routinely copied articles from rival Moneyweb.Moneyweb editor Ryk van Niekerk described it as “plagiarism on an industrial scale”. It was hard to disagree.In the end, the judge delivered a flawed ruling in which he found that of seven articles, Fin24 had broken the Copyright Act with only one.Yet, curiously, Media24 CEO Esmaré Weideman still declared this a “huge victory for Fin24”.This is some chutzpah, considering that, as Van Niekerk wryly pointed out, “the reality is that Fin24 stole an article” from a rival. And if you’re found guilty of one count of theft out of seven, you’re still a thief.Though the ruling wasn’t all bad — it found that copyright could exist in news articles — in the final analysis, it has dire impli...
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