South African copyright law—the good, the bad and the Copyright Amendment Bill

Marcus Riby-Smith, South African copyright law—the good, the bad and the Copyright Amendment Bill, Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Volume 12, Issue 3, March 2017, Pages 216–225, https://doi.org/10.1093/jiplp/jpx011

Extract

. As is the case with many other African countries, South Africa inherited her first intellectual property laws from her former colonial masters—the Netherlands and Great Britain. As the decades passed and South Africa progressed from a collection of colonies to a dominion and later a republic, successive revisions of the prevailing copyright law continued to be based on the regime then in force in Britain. 1 The South African Copyright Act 1978 (no 98 of 1978) (‘the 1978 Act’), which came into force on 1 January 1979, is no different. When enacted, and throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, South Africa’s copyright regime was commonly thought to compare favourably with legislation enacted in Western Europe and other developed countries. However, over the past two decades—while these jurisdictions have continually updated their laws to keep pace with global trends and technological developments—the 1978 Act has received relatively limited attention from the legislature. 2 This has resulted in South African copyright law becoming progressively outmoded.