Software is becoming increasingly central to many parts of our lives and needs to be able to adapt to an unknowable future
A bill to amend the 41-year-old Copyright Act has been passed by the National Council of Provinces on March 28 and now goes to the President for signature. Most of the media discussion on the bill has centered on how it will affect a legacy industry — publishing. But there has been surprisingly little discussion about the need to update copyright to cope with next-generation technologies.
While amending the 1978 Copyright Act to suit digital technology is important to the SA tech sector, software isn’t important only to this sector. Mobile banking runs on software, as do an increasing number of heart monitors. On March 14 2019 hundreds of Boeing aircraft were grounded because of a software problem. As Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen says, “software is eating the world”.
In February 2019 Microsoft, Red Hat, Mozilla and the Computer & Communications Industry Association all filed briefs asking the US supreme court to reject Oracle’s claim. Specific provisions in the bill will prevent similar threats to SA innovators, but they will only be safe when it is law. Anti-circumvention rules were created to prevent copying of recorded music and movies stored in what are now almost obsolete media. But anti-circumvention also applies to software, and so to an astonishing array of devices that rely on software to work.
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