Excerpt:  South Africans would benefit greatly from a provision that makes is clear that the technical processes at the heart of machine learning, cloud computing, text mining, plagiarism detection, automated detection of copyright infringement and constructing search engine indexes do not violate copyright law. Under current South African law, all these activities are arguably unlawful because, although they do not communicate the copyright owner’s original expression to the public in any way, they all rely on copying as an intermediate technical step. Thus, it is a matter of concern that the current copyright revision bill, B13-2017) (Copyright), appears to make no provision whatsoever for important large-scale applications of new digital technology that will important to research and development in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. As a result, the terms of the proposed revisions would leave South Africans at a permanent and crippling disadvantage compared to residents of the United States, Israel, South Korea and other countries that have adopted, or are considering adopting a so-called “fair use” approach to copyright limitations and exceptions, as well as other countries that may take a narrower approach to immunizing information technology innovators from liability.

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