Mike Palmedo and Andres Izquierdo
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We are legal researchers at American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). Our work focuses on copyright exceptions. We appreciate the opportunity to submit comments for the 2020 South Africa Country Practice Review.
Our submission demonstrates that it is common for countries to allow the use of copyrighted works for educational purposes – even full works – without the authorization of the copyright owner.
We reviewed the copyright laws all the Members of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO)[1] and the WIPO Group of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (GRULAC) – a total of 38 countries. The relevant legal texts are attached Annex 1. We asked two questions: How many countries’ laws contain a right to use excerpts of works for teaching without compensation? And how many (if any) allow the use of whole works for teaching?
Most countries in both groups did allow for unauthorized use of excerpts of copyrighted works for teaching purposes, without compensation. A smaller, but still significant number of countries allow the use of entire works. (In some instances, only press reports and short works can be reproduced in full. In other instances, there is no such restriction on the type of entire works that can be used.) Our “counts” for each of the questions are as follows:
How many of the laws contain a right to use excerpts of works for teaching without compensation?
32 Yes
5 No
1 Maybe/unclear (Kenya)
How many allow the use of whole works for teaching? (if any)
7 Yes
20 No
11 Maybe/depends on the type of work
FOOTNOTE
[1] The one omission is Somalia, which does not have its copyright law available in the WIPO Lex database.
