South Africa: Copyright Amendment Bill Could Be Finished Next Month

CAPE TOWN – The South Africa Parliament’s Portfolio Committee of Trade and Industry is expected to finalise the long-awaited Copyright Amendment Bill next month. But one more round of public comments is being sought in the meantime, with a deadline of this week.

The committee is still deliberating on the public submissions received after it published specific clauses of the Copyright Amendment Bill for comment, committee secretary Andre Hermans told Intellectual Property Watch in a recent phone interview.

“Our intention is to finalise in the month of October,” Hermans said.

The Copyright Amendment Bill was tabled in Parliament in May 2017.

The Portfolio Committee of Trade and Industry has met several times since last month, sifting through and debating the merits and practicalities of the submissions it has received. During this process, the committee again identified clauses of the Copyright Amendment Bill to be re-advertised and as a result, specific clauses dealing with the accreditation of collecting societies have been published for comment.

The latest call for public submissions on the bill can be viewed here.

This latest call follows an earlier advertisement for public comments about the bill in June this year. That’s when the committee published a list of clauses from the Copyright Amendment Bill for public comment, which attracted a wide range of interest and contributions from local and international intellectual property stakeholders.

Those published clauses dealt with artistic visual work, minimum content and retrospectivity, royalties and commissioned works, log sheets, reciprocity processes for collecting societies, finding owners and performers, penalties, and significant changes to the Copyright Tribunal and transitional arrangements to do with the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Act.

The published clauses of the Copyright Amendment Bill, from June, can be read here.

The deadline for submissions on those clauses closed on 18 July.

There is a wide range of opinion about the Copyright Amendment Bill, which has sparked intense lobbying among stakeholders themselves and which has extended to the Portfolio Committee of Trade and Industry members.

“That’s part of the process, it’s the nature of the process,” Hermans said. “We take into account what the public is saying.”

A summarized rubric of the submissions received and the key issues raised in each of the submissions was presented to the committee by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The document is available here [pdf].

Committee Member and Democratic Alliance Party MP Ghaleb Cachalia told Intellectual Property Watch in a phone interview: “Submissions have been worked through and we have been given recommendations from DTI on content and quality and the state legal advisor has given direction on drafting and practicality.”

The non-exhaustive summarised meeting notes of the deliberations show that some of the debate among committee members was about those submissions received that did not keep to the advertised scope for submissions, but included comments on other issues that were also relevant.

One example was a public comment that alerted the committee to the Cybercrimes and Cybersecurity Bill.

While the committee must take into consideration the submissions received, it must also ensure that the bill is aligned with the Performer’s Protection Amendment Bill, which was tabled in December 2016. The Performer’s Protection Amendment Bill seeks to address, among other things, the abuse of contracting parties’ rights, piracy and the non-payment of royalties.

The DTI has briefed the committee on the links between the Performer’s Protection Amendment Bill and the Copyright Amendment Bill.

 

Image Credits: South African Parliament