Censorship Bill back to drafters?

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 04 May 2007

Parliament's Home Affairs Portfolio Committee may send a controversial Bill to amend the Film & Publications Act back to its drafters, says its chairman, Patrick Chauke.

This follows two days of hearings on the Bill that the media decries for seeking to introduce a censorship regime "not even the apartheid government dared to enforce".

Among the parties making submissions were the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA), the Wireless Application Service Providers Association (WASPA) and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

"We don't want to legislate and see it going to court," Chauke told the Mail & Guardian. "We are going to speak to the state law advisers; we think we can come to an amicable solution."

Chauke could not be reached for comment this morning. Today's paper notes the remarks are in sharp contrast to his repeated insistence from the chair that the media does not demonstrate enough concern about the perils of child pornography or exposing children to adult content, and should face tighter regulation.

Democratic Alliance Home Affairs deputy spokesman Marius Swart says the Bill "as far as I am concerned, is fraught with difficulty and is unconstitutional in many respects". He adds that the objectives of the Bill, to clamp down on visual images of child abuse and to keep porn out of the hands of children, are laudable, "but we are going about it the wrong way".

Swart says self-regulation, as is currently the case, remains preferable.

Constitutional issues

In their presentations, most media houses and free speech champions concentrated on constitutional issues - the second day of the hearings (yesterday) fell on World Press Freedom Day.

Lawyer Mike Silber, ISPA's regulatory advisor, says his "main concern was to avoid the highly contentious freedom of speech issue and focus on how impractical many of the provisions are... Our concern is how the Internet and ISPs [Internet service providers] should be treated. ISPs provide access to the Internet, not content, so we believe government is trying to regulate the wrong people."

Silber told the committee that in the so-called "old media", an editor selected and distributed news through existing channels, such as newspapers. In the "new" media, an editor selects and distributes items through newer channels such as the Internet, but in "really new" media, anybody can do this "and self-publish through blogs, pod casts and peer-to-peer sharing networks such as YouTube and MySpace".

NAB advocate Steven Budlender told Chauke the Bill was unconstitutional on at least three counts:

* It subjects broadcasters to the control of the Film and Publications Board (FPB), which does not meet the constitutional standard for independence as its members are appointed and paid by the Home Affairs minister.

* It treats "any sequence of visual images" as a "film", and would mean that every single thing aired on television, from documentaries to news bulletins and sportscasts, would have to undergo a process of prior approval by the board, and a huge range of material would potentially be banned due to vague wording.

* Criminal offences detailed in the Bill violate freedom of expression and go too far in prohibiting legitimate expression.

WASPA chairman Leon Perlman says, in its submission, his organisation "demonstrated to the committee that the proposed classification procedures that charge per mobile content item at over R1 000/item - even for those that run for just a few seconds - would severely damage the WASP industry".

Perlman adds that with content catalogues in each WASP running into the hundreds of thousands, "this would put pressure on WASPs financially and also on FPB resources".