Deadline for Copyright Amendment Bill has lapsed

THE deadline for President Cyril Ramaphosa to sign the Copyright Amendment Bill into law – which would allow millions of visually impaired people, including the blind in South Africa, to access reading material in accessible formats – has lapsed.

Blind SA and others urged the South African government to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled.

The treaty seeks to address the global “book famine,” in which only a small percentage of books are published in accessible formats such as braille or large print.

Blind SA and Section27, which drove court applications to have the copyright ban uplifted, celebrated two years ago when the Constitutional Court found the Copyright Act unconstitutional for unfairly discriminating against persons with visual disabilities, thus ending the book famine.

It said that this judgment vastly and immediately improved access to books in accessible formats for people who are blind.

In a unanimous judgment, the court found “that those with print and visual disabilities suffer from a scarcity of access to literary works that persons without these impairments do not” due to the current Copyright Act, which therefore “constitutes unfair discrimination” on the basis of disability.

The highest court in the country has therefore ordered Parliament to remedy the constitutional invalidity of the current act within 24 months – which ran out on Sunday.

Two days before the deadline lapsed on Friday, Blind SA picketed outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria, where they urged the president to sign the amendment bill by yesterday.

Section27 said that it was now at risk of losing the court’s remedy, impacting the rights of those with visual disabilities.

IOL meanwhile reported that, reacting to the Section27 call, the leader of Intellectual Property and Social Justice, Tebogo Sithathu, said their stance had not changed that there were sections of the current bill that remained problematic, but that any hasty action by the president without re-looking at these problem areas would be detrimental to the creative industry.

“We still maintain that there are many aspects of the bill that remain problematic due to the infamous ‘fairuse’ provision which we maintain ‘is piracy glorified’ as it would definitely disadvantage artists, authors and creators,” said Sithathu.