[okfn-za] Please Sue Me

Thu May 2 13:39:57 UTC 2013

On 2013/05/02 01:00 PM, okfn-za-request at lists.okfn.org wrote:
> Also, legal advice would be welcome, I'm going out on
> a limb at the moment, probably fool-hardy and given Leon and
> Geoffrey's comments, possibly a little too impulsive. It would be good
> to have a professional give some thought to the practicalities of how
> to implement this which wouldn't end up costing me a million rand in
> legal bills.
>
> Adi

I'm late to this discussion and may have missed something. Plus, I'm NOT 
a lawyer. The best person to ask about this is probably Andrew Rens at 
andrew at opencounsel.net (http://aliquidnovi.org/about-2/).

The South African Copyright Act excludes from copyright any "official 
texts of a legislative, administrative or legal nature". So the question 
I suppose is what counts as an "official text". At Paperight, for 
example, we've chosen to treat all past matric exam papers as official 
administrative texts, so that we can distribute them at low cost through 
our member outlets. Might a generous interpretation include data sets as 
well? Given that the act was written in 1978 and last amended in 2002 (I 
believe), it's unlikely the authors were thinking about digital formats 
at the time, and texts may well have included administrative statistics 
documents.

Unfortunately, I suspect would only be settled if someone did sue, and 
there was a court decision about it.

Arthur