Ox Wagons, Trains and Cars: Once upon a time farmers could only get their crops to market on ox wagons.

A few of them used their own wagons but it took too long so most of them sold the food they grew to ox wagon owners who themselves could take the produce to market . The farmers often didn't get good prices especially those who were far away from towns. One day someone invented the combustion engine, and people started to make new machines; trains and cars. Trains could carry more food, faster and cheaper than ox-wagons. Farmers could sell more produce and make more money. But the ox wagon owners weren't happy. They wanted the law to “keep up with technology” by which they meant that they wanted rules to protect their businesses from the competition of the railways; ox wagon owners wanted to be able to make the railways offload food that ox -wagon owners claimed had been stolen from them and trains would have to go at the same speed as ox wagons. After a while the farmers weren't so happy either, as they realised that the railways had a monopoly and were making most of the money. Some thieves used fast cars to steal the crops and drive away quickly. The ox wagon owners kept on demanding more changes to the law that didn't matter to the farmers, they knew the world had changed, they wanted the government to build a highway so that they could take their crops to market themselves by truck, or at least have a choice of transport.

The Digital Revolution

Like the farmers selling their crop to the wagon owners, there was a time when the relationships that were established through copyright made sense for creators. Making lots of good copies was hard, and expensive; you needed to own a printing press, or a recording studio. So creators sold their rights to the people who owned presses and studios. This resulted in the owners having a lot of power, and making a huge profit despite the fact that most musicians and writers – the farmers – didn't make as much money. In that time anyone making copies was a competitor who could undercut the studio owner by charging less because he or she only had to pay for making copies, and did not need to pay the creator, however badly. In this market scenario it made sense to attempt to prohibit unauthorised copying because the only type of copying was largely commercial competition.

With the arrival of the internet, all this changed. Firstly, digital technology has made it much, much easier to get goods to the marketplace. And secondly, making exact copies is a cinch, in fact, the idea of what is an original or what is a copy of a digital creation tends to blur. The Internet like the train; enabled easier, cheaper and faster ways to share the produce. But digital technology does a curious thing: it works by making copies. Just for you to read a webpage, multiple copies must be made. The server hosting the webpage has a file of 1's and 0's unintelligible to you or I. On request it sends a copy to your internet service provider, which mades a copy to send to your computer, which in turn translates the string of 1's and 0's into what we perceive of as the web page. In other words, just for you to read the page multiple copies must be made. For you to show someone else the page then more copies must be made. If there is a copyright notice on the page – which is a notice that reserves all the rights to the rights holder - you would in practical terms have to make a copy of the page in order to read the notice.

Copyright, the right to stop people making copies doesn't make sense anymore. Traditional distribution channels that printed books, and press CD's find themselves competing with new distribution channels. At the same time there are new opportunities for creators; some musicians release their music directly through download stores, authors who couldn't get published before can 'self publish' e-books through Amazon.

The traditional distribution channel owners aren't happy about this, and call on government to continually change the law to protect their business models. Yet, like the wagon owners from a century ago, these models seldom represent the interests of actual creators. The traditional distribution channels refuse to offer content that they control through the new channels, and have gone so far as to sue their own customers who have made unauthorised uses of content.

South African copyright law is hopelessly out of date, it was passed in 1978. Representatives of the traditional distribution channels demand changes that suit them, for example the article by Owen Dean on 12 April 2010. The proposed changes are are also out of date, as they were conceptualised in the early 1990s before the web 2.0 revolution which introduced blogs and social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. This was the time before iPods and Amazon ebooks; before many people in South Africa had even heard about the Internet. After more than ten years of those laws many American experts say they are a disaster. A major re-think of copyright law has been begun in the United Kingdom with the British Council asking people to imagine what could be put in the place of copyright. South African law needs to change, but the changes must help South African artists and consumers, not foreign owned distribution channels. Adapt to the future, don't try to stop it.

Andrew Rens is an independent intellectual property expert who advises Freedom to Innovate South Africa and The African Commons Project Kerryn McKay.is the director of the 1978 ...What were you doing campaign on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/1978-What-were-you-doing/305870624860