Information Wants to be Property: Legal Commodification of E-commerce Assets

In the global information age, information per se is becoming one of the most valuable assets of many businesses. Because of this, the laws of many jurisdictions have started evolving to extend the protections for such information against unauthorised access, use and/or interference. These legal moves tend to have the direct or indirect effect of 'propertizing' aspects of the information in question. Recent moves in the area of copyright law in particular have shown a marked trend towards increased legal support for the commodification of commercially valuable information. Examples of this trend can be seen in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States and the Database Directive in the European Union. The following discussion examines this phenomenon and raises some questions about the desirable limits of legal commodification of information in this context.     

Understanding South Africa's foreign policy: the perplexing case of Zimbabwe

Many who have admired the African National Congress are confused and dismayed by post-apartheid South Africa's foreign policy on human rights and good governance, exemplified by its most important policy test to date, viz. Zimbabwe. It is argued below that understanding this policy in terms of the widely-used explanation that it represents ‘a shift from idealism to realism’ is unsatisfactory. This state-centric framework, focused on ‘national’ interests and ideals cannot accommodate the wide range of interests, ideals, and other factors that shape the policy. Instead, this investigation assumes that all foreign policies involve a close interaction between ‘realism’ (interest-driven analysis) and ‘idealism’ (beliefs/values-driven analysis). In addition to exploring this interaction, this paper also touches briefly and tentatively on the following questions: how well has South Africa's foreign policy been calculated and implemented, and what have been its effects and consequences for South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the ‘progressive’ international norms to which both South Africa and many of its critics subscribe. A subsidiary aim is to clarify some misunderstandings between South Africa and the West that frequently lead to their ‘talking past each other’ on this, and other, issues of human rights and good governance.