South Africa

Summary

South Africa presents moderate risk. The Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020 s.2 criminalises unlawful and intentional access to a computer system; public pages are not clearly within scope because "unlawful" requires absence of justification and publicly accessible sites carry implicit authorisation. ENS Africa legal commentary confirms that scraping of public data is not categorically prohibited under s.2. POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013, fully in force July 2021) applies to any collection of personal information, including from publicly available sources — public availability does not exempt processing. ECTA 2002 imposes additional security and consumer-protection obligations. Copyright Act 1978 uses a closed list of fair-dealing exceptions (research, private study, criticism, news) with no TDM provision. The Copyright Amendment Bill — which would introduce a broad fair-use doctrine, possible TDM-adjacent exceptions, and open-ended educational exceptions — was approved by Parliament in February 2024 but referred to the Constitutional Court by the President in October 2024 for constitutionality review. The Court heard arguments on 21–22 May 2025 and adjourned to deliberate; judgment has not been issued as of May 2026. No sui generis database right exists. Overall: public-page crawling of non-personal data is tolerable; personal-data collection requires a lawful basis; copyright in content must be respected; the copyright trajectory may improve pending the ConCourt ruling. fast_moving is retained because the judgment could alter the TDM/fair-use landscape at any time.