IN 2005 the Mail & Guardian launched a news aggregation site Amagama. At the same time it hijacked content from users on its own free Blogmark platform, and thus work posted under a non-commercial creative commons license scheme. The company thus...
Category: Digital Rights
Whose Knowledge, whose Internet?
THREE decades of online communication, and an ongoing electronic struggle and yet our country South Africa, is desperately lagging behind the West when it comes to the dissemination of knowledge and information technology. Compounding this problem is neo-colonialism, hegemony, the 'loudhailer on...
Send the ‘Groot Boetie’ FPB amendment & copyright bill back to legislators
ONE month ago, the controversial FPB amendment bill was passed by South Africa's Parliament. It came as a major blow to online content providers battling prior restraint and other apartheid-era laws from a previous period of newsroom censorship, and will ostensibly turn ISPs into cops, tasked wit...
Hellkom like no SOE ever scorned (part 3)
Saga of my three months without a landline, continued from part 2 DAY 85 October 24 The paralegal mediator calls me back, apparently the landlord wants me to pay for the infrastructure upgrade at his own building. I must spend money. I explain my compromise solution, it entails getting Telkom to...
How Internet rights were included in our constitution
IT WAS in 1995 that I returned from self-imposed exile and America’s West Coast. Having launched what would be the very first online act of mass civil disobedience against John Major’s Criminal Justice Bill the previous year. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Whitehall were...
Multichoice clampdown pre-empts debate on Bill of Rights
SOUTH AFRICANS won a massive victory for communications freedom when we saw the inclusion of the right 16(1)(b) which practically squashed anti-piracy litigation of the kind, contemplated by MIH Multichoice for nearly twenty years. Attempts to prohibit users from sharing information have met with...