The South African Copyright Law regulates all aspects of copyright in the country including the rights to compensation, acknowledgement, authorship, usage, and distribution of works protected under the South African Copyright Law. The main South African Copyright Laws are to be found in the 1978 Copyright Act and the amendment acts which have flown from [...]
Many website owners never take action against third parties that have copied content from their site without prior permission or full acknowledgement through the correct citation. It occurs because the site owners don’t know their rights under Copyright Law. Many mistakenly believe that under Copyright Law the work must first be registered as copyright protected. [...]
In South Africa, like in most Berne Convention countries, copyright subsist in a qualified work, the moment that the work is created in physical form. Therefore, no registration of copyright is necessary for copyright to subsist. Copyright provides exclusivity to the owner thereof to perform certain acts in respect of the works. In South Africa [...]
While certain parallels can be drawn between the registration process followed with intellectual property rights that is concerned with trademarks and patents, the copyright process is entirely different. First of all, there is no registration required for copyright to be effective. As a participating country of the Berne Convention, the South African Copyright Act vests [...]
As the author of an original work, you have the exclusive right to that work for a certain time period. These rights extend to factors such as its publication, distribution and adaptation, and is a form of intellectual property known as copyright. Depending on the territory as well as the nature of the work, the [...]
One of the most common disputes regarding copyright has to be with determining who holds the authorship of the work. In South Africa then copyright law is very clear on this, and the guidelines can be summarised as follows: Literary, musical or artistic works – the person who first makes or creates the work Films [...]
While it is generally accepted by copyright lawyers and other legal entities that copyright is automatically in force at creation of the work, subject to certain criteria, this copyright is not applicable indefinitely. Generally, the term of copyright is 50 years, depending on the nature of the work, and subject to the following: Literary, musical [...]
Similar to other forms of intellectual property such as trademarks and patents, and in fact conventional forms of property as well, copyrighted work often holds some kind of value, and can thus be transferred from one owner to another. This can happen by assignment, testamentary disposition or by operation of law. Copyright can also be [...]
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