An open letter to the minister of trade and industry

Thank you for your letter in reply to ours about the petition signed by thousands of authors asking that the Copyright Amendment Bill not be adopted.

Copyright law should balance authors’ entitlement to reward for their talents and labour with the needs of society to benefit from what they have written. You also wrote that textbooks and scholarly journals are expensive. You seem to be saying that the law should make them cheaper. Anfasa members, teachers and academics, are also concerned that students can’t afford books. That is why at universities extracts from published works are copied under licence.

Because copyright is so vulnerable to vested interests, someone may have deliberately passed on incorrect information about costs to students. This does not gainsay the objective of the department of trade and industry for copyright to stimulate research, innovation and creativity, but the Copyright Amendment Bill will fail to reduce such costs.

None of the concerns we raised or the points we made about the balance of needs and interests that copyright should preserve were taken into account. We conclude that there may have been another agenda exerting influence on the decision-makers. Silicon Valley is replete with tech companies eyeing their place in the digital future. The broader the “fair use” regimes are worldwide, the easier it will be for them to gain access to intellectual property and use it for their own gain. Check the reports detailing how persuasive the American emissaries can be in convincing organisations and even governments that more and more exceptions are necessary in order to “re-use” and “re-create” the creativity of others without their permission.

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