The South African Open Copyright Review Final Report is online

As annouced by Andrew Rens at the Shuttleworth Foundation:

The final Report of the South African Open Copyright Review is online.

The Review closed last year, but its taken us a bit of time to produced a properly formatted downloadable version of the final Report. Now we have and its available for download, under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike South Africa 2.5 licence.

The Report includes recommendations on exceptions and limitations, Orphan Works, strengthening the Public Domain, and parallel import.

The Report comes at an interesting point in the debate about copyright. Although librarians and educators have argued for appropriate exceptions and limitations, ever since the current Copyright Act was passed in 1978 (and possibly before then), the issues of Orphan Works and the Public Domain have been largely neglected, and the prohibition on parallel imports has received far too little attention.

Basic reforms on these issues are overdue.