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ARTICLE · 29 JUNE 2016

Copyright, Fair Dealing And Hyperlinks

ENS
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A South African court has found that, for the purposes of fair dealing in copyright law, hyperlinks are a sufficient way of acknowledging source and ownership.

South AfricaIntellectual Property
Ilse Du Plessis
Ilse Du Plessis
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A South African court has found that, for the purposes of fair dealing in copyright law, hyperlinks are a sufficient way of acknowledging source and ownership.

The recent decision in the case of Moneyweb (Pty) Limited v Media 24 Limited and Another (unreported case no. 31575/2013, 5 May 2016) attracted a great deal of publicity. This is possibly because the two main parties are media companies. Moneyweb is an online financial news service and Media24 has an online financial news aggregator, Fin24.

The central issue for the court to decide was whether Media24 had infringed Moneyweb's copyright in seven financial news articles. Each of the seven articles was written by journalists for, or on behalf of, Moneyweb and in each case parts of the article had been reproduced by Media24.

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