M&G's Nic Dawes: the most skilled at damaging the finances of the SABC are clearly the managers of the corporation

SHOOT: The SABC pulls an episode twice, then whines when another company publishes the episode?

Dawes: Perhaps it is too much to expect the SABC's lawyers, or indeed Chris Moerdyk, to know that there is precedent both locally and in the British courts for a defence against copyright claims based on the public interest, and that our constitution is a further bulwark for such a defence.

SHOOT: The SABC don't have the money to take their circus to court.

clipped from www.bizcommunity.com Chris Moerdyk (SABC vs M&G: will the truth ever come out?) is worried. He thinks the Mail & Guardian may have stooped to theft in obtaining an episode of Special Assignment that SABC executives have twice pulled off the air. Almost as bad, he suggests, is our “vigilantism” in posting the episode on the M&G Online, a move which he frets may put all copyright holders at risk. I won't get into how we obtained the episode, for obvious reasons, but I am assured by some of the best lawyers in the country that it is impossible to steal an intangible. We have a copy of a digital file. The SABC still has the original. Let us be clear about this, we did not post a pirate copy of Wolverine on our website, or even of Egoli. We are dealing with very specific circumstances here. The SABC, a public institution with a crucial constitutional mandate, funded in part with public money, and answerable to Parliament, twice pulled off the air a programme deemed politically sensitive.