A bright yellow poster from 1986, reprinted in a recent book from the South African History Archives, is headlined: “National Education Conference: People’s Education for People’s Power!” A photograph shows a throng of students, young and old, marching with angry banners that say “We want SRCs” and “Unban Cosas”.
Prominent among them is one banner that spills out on to the poster. It says, simply, “Free Books for All”.
Ten years of democracy later, students have representative councils and the Congress of South African Students has long been unbanned. But as for books, well, that’s another story.
Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, prescribed reading in some schools, costs three times as much in South Africa as it does in the United States. Nobel Prize-winner JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, a school English literature setwork, is available in Britain at half its South African price.
Even the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, essential to students of English as a second language, costs twice as much here as in India. Publishers noted this disparity. So they called attention not to the high price of books, not to the scarcity of books in languages that people prefer speaking, and not to the debilitating rules that govern the use of digital content, but to something they term “the lack of a reading culture”.
But, regardless of whether we have the “right” culture to read, most of us don’t have a choice because books are just too expensive.
The inaccessibility of learning materials is a problem for primary and secondary schools, where the Department of Education spends more than R1-billion on textbooks and is still left with four students having to share one book. It is also a problem for individuals, who are confronted with expensive curricular shopping lists at university.
The South African Students Congress notes that the cost of learning materials at university can be as high as a third of tuition fees. Faced with a shortage of textbooks in school, a scarcity of funds to buy required texts at university and inadequate access to libraries, it is not surprising that students and teachers have been occasionally forced to make their own copies. But they risk an unwitting criminalisation.
Learning materials are protected by copyright law, which is administered by the Department of Trade and Industry. Copyright can be thought of as a temporary monopoly granted by the state for the creation and distribution of scholarship.
But publishers have increasingly used the 50-year protection granted to them by copyright to shut out any reasonable requests to make learning materials accessible, even when these are sanctioned and encouraged by international trade treaties.
The South African University Vice-Chancellors’ Association and the Committee of Technikon Principals have tried to negotiate better textbook accessibility deals with the industry. The industry’s priority, instead, is to push for criminalising copyright “offences”.
To consider how ridiculous this is, imagine a teacher in rural South Africa who is trying to educate her students in an environment that lacks funds and infrastructure. Out of sheer duress, she copies parts of a textbook to get material to her students. And how does the publishing industry suggest she be rewarded?
With five years in jail. When South Africa signed its accession treaty to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), it acceded to the organisation’s tough intellectual property laws designed to criminalise breaches of copyright. Now the publishing industry is pushing to make criminalisation more visible.
In truth, learning materials are not even the most profitable products of the publishing industry. Computer software for business and entertainment is the where the real money is. But through rash lobbying, industry’s “one size fits all” approach disregards the fact that access to essential learning materials is a cornerstone of social and economic development.
Currently, the law can correct excessive pricing for learning materials through what is called a “compulsory licence” allowed by the WTO’s Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property agreement. This allows anyone to produce what was previously exclusively owned.
An effective law could also boost the diversity of languages in education and help disabled learners, by transferring unused rights for translation and adaptation to the public domain, for an NGO or community organisation to use.
Yet the Print Industries Cluster Council (PICC) is at loggerheads with university and technikon libraries in the country because it believes that “fair dealing”, an established principle in international copyright law, should not allow teachers to reproduce small parts of copyrighted material for free.
The PICC wishes to retain the current law, which does not allow teachers to reproduce a reasonable amount of text from copyrighted works, for free distribution in the classroom. This is odd, given that the same principle allows teachers in countries as diverse as the US, India and Britain to make multiple free copies within limits.
Next week intellectual property rights (IPR) experts, activists, policymakers and publishers from Southern Africa will convene in Johannesburg to discuss why IPRs are an essential component of development and how the two must be integrated.
It will be a welcome opportunity for copyright users, such as students and teachers, to discuss their concerns with the current copyright regime, not to mention potentially threatening IPR conditions in the US-South African Customs Union free-trade agreement.
In all the complex, technical arguments about copyright law, the opinions of those affected on the ground have rarely been heeded. It is time they were.
Achal Prabhala coordinates the project on access to learning materials in Southern Africa, at the Consumer Institute South Africa