PIJIP has created a table of comments submitted to the South African Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry regarding the Copyright Amendment Bill. It was last updated on July 19, 2017. Please send additional comments to mpalmedo@wcl.american.edu, and I…
[Matthew Sag and Sean Flynn, IP Watch, Link (CC-BY-NC-SA)] This week, the South African Parliament began accepting comments on its pending Bill proposing to amend the South African Copyright Act to align it with the digital age. We and other experts and…
Click here for the full comment (PDF) I am writing to commend you on the drafted, revised Copyright Amendment Bill 2017. The Amended Bill is a vast improvement on the prior Bill. In particular, there must be commendation for changes…
Click here for the full comment (PDF) Excerpt: Our Federation welcomes Government’s initiative to review and modernize the legal framework for copyright in South Africa and implement the provisions of the WIPO Internet Treaties. We collectively believe in the need…
Excerpt: South Africans would benefit greatly from a provision that makes is clear that the technical processes at the heart of machine learning, cloud computing, text mining, plagiarism detection, automated detection of copyright infringement and constructing search engine indexes do…
[Submitted by Tobias Schonwetter] Excerpt: We note that the 2017 Bill is, as far as the drafting is concerned — and subject to our specific comments below — a marked improvement to the 2015 Copyright Amendment Bill. Some technical drafting errors…
Submitted jointly by the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights, Communia, Centrum Cyfrowe, and Creative Commons Click here for the full submission (PDF) Excerpt: We write to support the inclusion of a modern general exception in section 12 of…
Comment Submitted to the Protfolio Committee on Trade and Industry by Wikimedia ZA President Douglas Scott Excerpt: We make this submission to request that the current South African law be amended to protect the right of FoP, namely the right to…
Click here for the full comment (PDF) Excerpt: This comment presents results of ongoing research on copyright limitations being conducted by American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). The research demonstrates that positive…
[Printable PDF of this Comment] The Library Copyright Alliance (“LCA”) consists of three major library associations in the United States: the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries. These associations represent…
Click here for the full submission (PDF) Excerpt: Filmmakers support the added detail that the 2017 bill gives to what is currently a “fair dealing” exception, now proposed to be called “fair use.” Much that is in the proposed fair use…
Supreme Court Adopts Wink-Wink Patent Utility Rule In a stunning reversal of policy, on June 30, 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned decades of precedent making it easier for the biopharmaceutical industry to gain patents on medicines without any…