Judge closes the book on war of words between rival dictionary teams

A publisher’s claim that a rival copied its English-Afrikaans children’s dictionary is a taal story‚ the Supreme Court of Appeal has ruled.

Media24 Books appealed after the Cape Town High Court threw out its copyright claim against Oxford University Press‚ but Judge Malcolm Wallis‚ sitting with four other judges‚ dismissed the appeal and awarded costs against Media24.

The case — thought to be only the second dictionary copyright row to have come to court anywhere in the world — had its roots in 2011‚ when Media24 started work on a new Aanleerderswoordeboek.

Examining the rival Oxford Woordeboek‚ it concluded that to a “substantial extent” it had been copied from its own previous edition‚ said Wallis. One of the key areas of alleged plagiarism referred to examples of word use.

Explaining “baie”‚ both dictionaries used the sentence: “Baie dankie vir jou help.” Wallis said Media24 failed to prove that the Oxford dictionary’s three compilers had copied the rival dictionary.

They did not know each other; they were highly qualified lexicographers who would not have risked their reputations; and the “plagiarism” was limited to less than 10% of the dictionary.

“It seemed on the surface to be a situation of nothing to gain and everything to lose‚” said Wallis‚ and the possibility that each of them had independently decided to plagiarise the Aanleerderswoordeboek was “vanishingly small”.

Many of the smiliarities between the dictionaries were “likely to have arisen from the adoption of the most obvious ordinary example in the use of the word in common parlance among schoolchildren”‚ said Wallis.