COPYRIGHT ACT: final ConCourt Blind SA ruling

Exactly two weeks before the Constitutional Court is scheduled to begin a two-day hearing on the Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB), the court issued a final order replacing one handed down on 13 December 2024 as an interim measure. This followed an application originally brought before the court in 2022 by Blind SA, represented by Section27.

The interim order (which has never been publicly available) allowed the visually impaired greater access to copyright protected print material for conversion into alternative formats, as was widely reported at the time. This followed the expiry of a two-year deadline in terms of which the Copyright Amendment Bill was expected to have been amended and signed into law – among other things remedying provisions in the 1978 Copyright Act making it illegal for a visually impaired person to convert print material into alternative formats without the permission of the copyright holder concerned.

The deadline was part of a Constitutional Court order handed down on 21 September 2022, when a read-in section 13A took immediate effect. The read-in provision spelled out an exception applicable to the visually impaired and otherwise print disabled with the aim of facilitating access to copyright protected material for conversion into alternative formats.

In its 13 December 2024 interim order, the Constitutional Court reinstated read-in section 13A pending the conclusion of a tortuous CAB parliamentary process begun in 2017. Since then, the beleaguered Bill has been passed, remitted by the President, passed again and referred by the President to the court for a ruling on the constitutionality of several clauses of concern to some stakeholders and, apparently, to the President himself.

A 7 May 2025 Constitutional Court post-final-judgment media summary may have informed a Cape Times article published early the following morning. At the time, IOL News was the only mainstream online news source to run with the Cape Times story – which unfortunately included a rather confusing mixed message. It refers to the 7 May 2025 final order as having "reverted to the position before this court’s original order" – which is not so. The article then self-corrects by stating that, in terms of the final order, 'section 19D of the CAB be immediately read into the Copyright Act until the CAB is passed into law'.

Later that day, Section27 posted a media statement on its website more accurately summarising the final order – since when the Southern African Legal Information Institute has added flynotes to its website page briefly reflecting the gist of provisions now in force under the Act until Parliament has passed the necessary amending legislation.

And on 9 May 2025, BizCommunity published an article making sense (in laypersons' terms) of what is undoubtedly a development of considerable significance to South Africa's visually impaired and otherwise print disabled community.

Constitutional Court hearings on the CAB clauses of concern to the President are expected to begin on Wednesday 21 May 2025.