Copyright Amendment Bill, general fair use exception

Section 12A of the Copyright Amendment Bill, 2017 would add a general fair use exception under which fair use of a work, for purposes including research, private study, criticism, review, reporting current events, scholarship, teaching, education, parody, and preservation by libraries and archives, does not infringe copyright, assessed against a four-factor test covering the nature of the work, the amount used, the purpose and commercial character of the use, and the effect on the potential market for the work, with source and author attribution required.

This open-ended exception would reach an aggregator's reproduction and a model developer's text-and-data-mining use more broadly than the Copyright Act's current closed list of exceptions, but the Constitutional Court's assessment in Ex parte President of the Republic of South Africa (CCT 306/24) on 26 June 2026 held only that section 12A is not an arbitrary deprivation of property and is constitutional; the Bill as a whole, including a separate education exception the Court found partly unconstitutional, has not been returned to Parliament, amended, or signed into law.