Ms Rita Hayes, Deputy Director-General, World Intellectual Property Organisation;
Mr McDonald Netshitenzhe, the copyright expert from the Dept. of Trade and Industry;
Members of the National Council for Library and Information Services Council, the Legal Deposit Committee, the National Library of South Africa and the South African Library for the Blind;
Officials of various government Departments and of the publishing and broad information sector;
Honoured guests and participants,

My task this morning is to address you on the impact of the Copyright Act, 1978 (as amended) on the four national Library and Information Services Acts that the Department of Arts and Culture administers. I trust that you are all aware that this workshop follows one the held in Cape Town in 2005, where the stakeholders discussed this national legislation with a view to its updating and amendment.

The recommendations made at today’s workshop, which will focus specifically on the cross-cutting impact of copyright issues on all four Acts, will be consolidated with the recommendations for amendment made at the 2005 workshop. They will then be presented to me for consideration. This initiative of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa, a Chief Directorate in the DAC’s Heritage, Archives and Libraries Branch, dovetails with the current exercise of revising all the heritage legislation administered by the Department of Arts and Culture.

The national Library and Information Services legislation I have referred to above comprises the National Council for Library and Information Services Act of 2001; the National Library of South Africa Act of 1998; the South African Library for the Blind Act of 1998, and the Legal Deposit Act of 1997. The Bill of Rights in our Constitution declares that everyone has the right of access to information. This is a right that our government has enshrined in legislation in the form of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.

The Department of Arts and Culture is responsible for creating, maintaining and administering this broad legislative framework for library and information services at the national level. I hope that we all recall how important the sharing of information was during the years of our struggle for national liberation. In the collective national effort to stimulate socio-economic development and to sustain human rights, the sharing of information is indispensable.

Ladies and gentlemen, in order to understand why the question of copyright is such a crucial, and often a vexing issue for libraries, let us briefly reflect on why libraries are so important for society, especially in a country with a history like ours.

In this era, which has been variously dubbed the information age, libraries play a vital role. Democracy is reliant on an informed public. Consequently, giving citizens access to all the information necessary to make informed decisions enriches and enhances democracy. It is as necessary for young learners, as it is for mature adults. The concept of lifelong learning would be unattainable without libraries.

Library and Information Services are at the core of the information revolution. South African society, including the LIS sector, is being transformed in a concerted effort to eliminate past injustices and inequities. The LIS sector, especially public and community libraries, are facing a huge increase in the demand for their services. These challenges must be addressed in order to promote democracy and the socio-economic development of our country.

These challenges include:
• raising the levels of literacy and access to information technology;
• promoting a culture of reading and life-long learning;
• stimulating the publishing industry to publish more works in all literary genres and non-fiction in African languages in order for South Africa to become a nation of readers;
• and, most importantly, the transformation of information services and library collections to answer the needs of all communities.

Our government has taken a major step towards dealing with these challenges. The National Treasury has allocated an amount in excess of R1 billion to the Department of Arts and Culture for revitalising the public and community libraries of South Africa. I understand that that has generated great excitement in the LIS community -- understandably so. A tender has just been awarded to investigate a best-practice funding model for the allocation these funds. Recently, our National Library received a substantial donation from the Carnegie Foundation. It is my belief that the upgrading and expansion of the public library system will be of immense and long-lasting benefit to our society.

The challenges we face also exist within the global context of the development of electronic information and the Internet. Across the world librarians and archivists are debating how this profound revolution is transforming their professions. One of the biggest challenges is the preservation of information in the electronic environment. This complex issue affects intellectual property, copyright, legal deposit, archival, and other national issues. Our national institutions, including the National Library of South Africa, Blindlib, the National Council for Library and Information Services, and the Legal Deposit Committee play a vital role in providing the policy for handling these matters of national importance.

We are all aware of copyright issues in our daily lives, affecting not only the copying of books and other reading materials, but also duplication, buying and selling of pirated copies of, for example, films, music and designs. Numerous articles and reports in newspapers and other media sensitise us to the fact that a crime is committed when intellectual property rights are violated, resulting in the originator of a creative work being deprived of income. This vicious cycle can have serious financial repercussions for the publishing industry and the authors they publish.

I am well aware that there are diverse points of view on how strictly the Copyright Act, 1978, should be applied in developing countries. If a learner or student desperately needs a book which is too expensive to buy, or which is simply unavailable except in a library, what should the teacher or the librarian do? Should they turn a blind eye and photocopy the text to help the library user, knowing no other way to provide the information needed? Under such circumstances, can we not condone such a practice? Is it not morally justifiable to follow that course if our whole country will eventually benefit?

However, there are other considerations. The law cannot be broken without serious consequences for society. It has been illustrated, for instance, that a diminishing income for publishers and authors results in books becoming more expensive, putting them even further beyond the reach of those who need them. Should the random and uncontrolled copying of books be permitted it would be practically impossible to export works of literature, thus depriving the national economy of another possible source of income.

From this it becomes clear that copyright problems are not easy to resolve and that copyright, along with the broader issues of intellectual property rights, have important impacts on the economic development of a country. Copyright issues are also of great importance to Blindlib, which re-publishes reading material in Braille and makes it available in audio format for those who are sight impaired. There are no easy answers. But, we have to find solutions.

What meaning do we attach to copyright as it affects music in our day? Given the advances in Information and Communications technology over the past fifteen years, it is conceivable for someone as far away as Japan to download the work of a musician in Johannesburg by punching a few keys. Is our response to apply the law more rigourously or do we have to explore more creative responses that take account of the technologies of tomorrow which even as we speak are being worked on in research and development laboratories in every part of the world?

Is the pirate merely a thief, who silently robs the creative artist and thinker of his/her intellectual goods, or is the pirate a bold innovator who explores the limitless possibilities of our information technology? Would the creative persons amongst us prefer their work to be legally protected but consequently accessible to a limited audience? Or would they rather that it was widely disseminated even if it costs them royalties?

These dilemmas of the information age have to be seriously addressed because they will not disappear or decline as we move forward. Every step we take in the development of our information technology will compound these problems, making it imperative that all stakeholders discuss in earnest the need to reconfigure the entire legal regime governing copyright. If the law is not to be reduced to an object of ridicule, it must keep abreast of the technological advances that have made it possible to communicate with the entire world in a matter of minutes through cyber-space.

I am glad that we have gathered here a number of experts who will address us on the socio-economic aspects of copyright relating to authors, publishers and libraries. I would like to thank the Department of Foreign Affairs for arranging for Ms Rita Hayes, a very senior official of the World Intellectual Property Office in Geneva, to give the keynote address on copyright and developmental issues at this workshop. I would also like to thank Ms Hayes for accepting the invitation.

I wish you very fruitful deliberations. I am confident that the many viewpoints presented at this workshop will be both stimulating and thought-provoking. I look forward to your contribution to the efforts of the Department of Arts and Culture to align our national Library and Information Services policy with other government policies and legislation. We can then truly say that the stakeholders have been consulted.

I thank you.

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