The Copyright Amendment Draft Bill (GG No 39028, 27 July 2015) (‘the Bill’) is by all accounts a grave misfortune and a study in amateur law-making. Enough has been said on this point to make it clear that the DTI has tripped at the first hurdle and that a re-evaluation is the only hope of achieving a grade that would admit it to the Introduction to Copyright Law 101 examination.

However, it is noteworthy that the Bill contains a set of provisions that is worthy of (limited) praise and deserving of closer analysis. These are, among others, the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act (‘the Act’) that seek to incorporate anti-circumvention protection measures where a copyrighted work in digital format is protected by or controlled with the aid of digital rights management (DRM) tools or technological protection measures (TPM).

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Written by Cobus Jooste, Lecturer, Department of Mercantile Law, Fellow Chair of Intellectual Property Law, Faculty of Law, Stellenbosch University