{"id":133073,"date":"2019-03-15T06:47:41","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T04:47:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/free-to-reproduce-free-to-exploit-south-africas-copyright-amendment-bill-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2019-03-15T06:47:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T04:47:41","slug":"free-to-reproduce-free-to-exploit-south-africas-copyright-amendment-bill-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/free-to-reproduce-free-to-exploit-south-africas-copyright-amendment-bill-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Free to reproduce, free to exploit: South Africa’s copyright amendment bill | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free to reproduce, free to exploit: South Africa’s copyright amendment bill<\/a>: <\/p>\n

If passed as is, the South African Copyright Amendment Bill will lead to revenue and job losses in the publishing industry.<\/span> Shutterstock<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Being an academic is like driving a car. We can all do it but few of us actually know how a car is manufactured. When something goes wrong, we phone the Automobile Association. <\/p>\n

Similarly, as academics we know how to write, but few have any idea how the publication value chain operates. When something goes wrong we call the editor. The Academic and Non-fiction Authors\u2019 Association is like the AA for authors \u2013 and there\u2019s about to be a collision with the South African Copyright Amendment Bill. <\/p>\n

The general consensus of a recently organised symposium attended by copyright lawyers, law professors, university presses, journal editors, copyright officers and other interested parties is that the proposed bill will hammer one more nail into the coffin of South Africa\u2019s ailing university system.<\/p>\n

The Copyright Amendment Bill applies a very wide ranging definition of \u201cfair use\u201d on all materials to be used for \u201ceducation\u201d. Free access to information is the cry \u2013 but as always, someone is paying. By eliminating the rights of educational authors and publishers and making all published work \u201cfree\u201d to be reproduced, the bill could alienate authors from the fruits of their labour and their right to be cited. <\/p>\n

Section 12D of the bill allows for unrestricted copying of content \u201cfor educational and academic purposes\u201d provided that the copying doesn\u2019t exceed the length justified by the purpose (open to interpretation by a court). The section lists the reproduced content as: \u201cprinted and electronic course packs, study packs, resource lists and in any other material to be used in a course of instruction or in virtual learning environments\u2026\u201d. <\/p>\n

The section further states that the \u201cname of the author shall be indicated as far as is practicable\u201d. This means it can be left out where not practicable, which opens the door to plagiarism and could lead to authors not being cited.<\/p>\n

There will be many negative effects if the bill\u2019s amendments are accepted. Some of these are outlined in a study conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers which assessed the bill\u2019s possible impacts on South Africa\u2019s publishing industry.<\/p>\n

The ripple effect<\/h2>\n

The study found that that if the bill is accepted as is proposed, the publishing industry will experience a 33% decline in sales. This could result in a R2.1 billion loss in revenue and 1250 jobs will be lost in a country where the official unemployment rate is 27%.<\/p>\n

What might happen under a reproduction without permission or royalty system? Publishers of both journals and books will institute hefty article processing charges and open access fees will be paid upfront. This means that the cost of publication will no longer be absorbed by publishers. In this model, the author pays. And it\u2019s an expensive business.<\/p>\n

The subscription driven \u201creader pays\u201d model will decline, which means that economies of scale stretched across tens of thousands of subscribing libraries and millions of readers will be replaced with authors paying for readers to read. Less work will be published less often as authors will need to access large sums of money from a limited number of donors to pay for publication. The rank and file who don\u2019t have access to donor funding will have to pay from their own pockets and research grants.<\/p>\n

In Canada, where a similar provision was enacted in 2012, the negative effects on the industry are clear. There, widespread copying depressed book sales. Here, the volume of publication output may decrease, and South African journals might become more selective in what they publish. Getting reproduced books for free will also not result in lower costs to students if the Canadian experience is anything to go by. <\/p>\n

The consequences<\/h2>\n

Big tech companies will be legally able to appropriate authors\u2019 intellectual work, monetise it and sell their labour to advertisers. Academics will not own their intellectual labour. Researchers and textbook writers will be enriching these companies because they won\u2019t have to buy permission for reproducing educational texts from publishers.<\/p>\n

South Africa\u2019s educational publishing industry will decline. This will put the breaks on the decolonisising of curricula in academia because homegrown publishers publishing homegrown content will have difficulty entering into the market. The country will again become reliant on expensive international imports written for international readers.<\/p>\n

The counter position argues exactly the opposite \u2013 that all will be well because information freedom will be attained. This argument confuses access with content. Content needs to be created, published and circulated. Content is created out of a particular research and publication production value chain. Access is the consumption side: it involves readers. Libraries, for example, don\u2019t produce content. They house it. Libraries, like bookshops, enable readers to access the content. <\/p>\n

The proposed bill will not only be harmful to authors but to the sustenance of scholarly innovation and cultural development.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

Keyan G Tomaselli works at the University of Johannesburg and is affiliated with the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He receives funding from the National Research Foundation. He is editor of Critical Arts and co-editor of Journal of African Cinemas. He serves as series editorial board member for the following academic Presses: University of South Africa, Toronto and Michigan State. He is a board member of the Academic and Non-fiction Authors' Association for South Africa, and a member of the Academy of Science for South Africa and its National Scholarly Editors' Forum<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Source:<\/strong> The Conversation \u2013 Articles (AFRICA)<\/a><\/small>
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Free to reproduce, free to exploit: South Africa’s copyright amendment bill: If passed as is, the South African Copyright Amendment Bill will lead to revenue and job losses in the publishing industry. Shutterstock Being an academic is like driving a car. We can all do it but few of us actually know how a car […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4584],"tags":[4635,4964,4253,8890,27053,21317,3053,34206,3576],"class_list":{"0":"post-133073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-africa-news-2","7":"tag-africas","8":"tag-amendment","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-conversation","11":"tag-copyright","12":"tag-exploit","13":"tag-free","14":"tag-reproduce","15":"tag-south","16":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}