The latest draft of the Convergence Bill ignores public submissions to the first draft and is a lost opportunity in terms of promoting the country`s culture, says a UCT law professor.
Julien Hofman made these comments to ITWeb in a discussion at the University of Cape Town about the proposed Convergence Bill, for which public hearings are due to start on 24 May.
"I am nervous about the content licensing provisions because they could constitute a considerable intrusion on the freedom of speech that is enshrined in the constitution. If there is no technical need for content licensing provisions and they could impose impossible social obligations on content providers in the future, there is no reason to include them," Hofman says.
Dominic Cull, an associate at law firm Nicci Fergusson, believes the content licensing provisions were put in place to help define some of the other licence classes in the bill.
"This was done to say that an infrastructure provider or an applications service provider is not a content provider. I don`t think that the content licences will be an issue in the future," he says.
Hofman says the lack of imagination concerning culture relates to various content distribution formats that could be used on the Internet.
"For instance, radio streaming can allow for the economic distribution of locally developed music to an audience that specifically wants it in an economical manner. We [as a country] are too worried about protecting our cultural heritage, rather than giving it an opportunity to thrive."
Hofman says the Convergence Bill has too much of an emphasis on licensing rather than on how to standardise transactions.
"This is another opportunity that could be lost. For instance, in Europe there is a big concern on how to standardise transactions over cellphones - an issue that can have a big impact on this country," he says.
Cull says the latest draft of the Convergence Bill bears little, if any, resemblance to the original of two years ago and it also refers to the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) Amendment Act, which has not been presented for public comment.
"We have to accept in good faith that the ICASA Amendment Act will be well written and the two bills probably will be presented as a package for Parliament to pass before the year-end."
Share