Intellectual Property

Although it has been known for many years that a collection of data is capable of being protected by the Copyright Act No. 98 of 1978, it is always difficult for an organisation to go down the road of initiating legal proceedings against a copyright infringer. One of the main aspects relating to this is that – unlike really “orginal” works, the “originality” in a database is often not the data itself (which can be freely available) but in the fact that the database puts it all together in one place.