Source: Record Of Law

South African copyright law is principally governed by the Copyright Act 98 of 1978, which grants rights to human authors for original works. The Act defines authorship as the person who took the necessary steps to create the work and requires originality grounded in the skill, effort, or judgment of a human creator. Courts have maintained that copyright protection applies only to human-made works and consistently associate originality with meaningful human input. The Act includes a special provision for “computer-generated works,” but this was drafted prior to the emergence of modern generative AI and assumes human involvement.

The distinction between “computer-generated” works—created entirely by a computer without human intervention—and “computer-assisted” works that involve human contribution has been clarified by South African courts. In Payen Components SA Ltd v Bovic CC, the Appellate Division set out this differentiation, and in Haupt t/a Softcopy v Brewers Marketing Intelligence (Pty) Ltd, the Supreme Court of Appeal confirmed that only works created completely by computers qualify as computer-generated, while those with human input are computer-assisted. Jurisprudence also confirms that originality requires more than mechanical copying and entails application of the mind, effort, and judgment by the human author. The current legal framework does not define the level of human involvement required for copyright protection in the context of AI-generated works and presents unresolved issues regarding AI’s role in creativity.