Copy rights and responsibilities defining the South African public commons
- What do the Lion King, rooibos tea and southafrica.com have in common?
- Who owns Madiba’s face? Why can’t SAB just Laugh It Off?
- Why are films like _The Mielie Kids_ (1917) and _Sarie Marais_ (1931) so important?
- What exactly is indigenous knowledge and how do we protect it?
Growing increasingly broad in recent years, copyright has come to determine what music we listen to, what we write on our T-shirts, how rich or how poor we are and what we remember in the information age. Because data is the most valued resource in the new economy, the ownership of that data has become the source of a new battleground to determine at what rate communities are able to innovate and develop in the information age.
Drawing inspiration from the Free Software Movement, Creative Commons was launched in 2001 to provide an alternative to the default copyright rules that govern music, film, books and images. By acknowledging the “copy responsibilities” that informed copyright’s origin in eighteenth century Europe, Creative Commons uses simple copyright contracts to develop new forms of communal ownership.
South Africa, often at the front line of battles around global copyright has a unique and timely opportunity to lead with intellectual property rights innovations such as those proposed by Creative Commons. It is unclear who will win the battle over whether there will be more copy rights than responsibilities in the information age, but what is clear is that business, communities, NGOs and government cannot afford to remain ignorant about copyright and its effects.
Join Heather Ford, public lead for Creative Commons South Africa, to discuss the impact of copyright on the future of the South African public commons.
Tuesday, 31 August: 5:30 - 7:00pm: School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, LB 144 (follow signs from ground floor of Law Building, West Campus)
To RSVP, please contact Heather Ford, heather@creativecommons.org or Jonathan Klaaren, Klaarenje@law.wits.ac.za