ABSTRACT
This chapter considers general legal institutions which protect data without much regard to the storage medium. It focuses on the rights with the more straightforward economic justification, which reward those who invest resources to produce or discover useful aggregations of information, and can reasonably expect the law to protect that investment and its value in the market place. Legal protection of data and ideas is routinely referred to as the 'law of intellectual property', and use of that label is not seen as tying its user to any particular ideological conception of the area. Copyright is probably still the most important of intellectual property doctrines. 'Copyright' is infringed by the making of unauthorised copies, or where anyone uses the copyright work as the model for their own work. Breach of copyright can be regarded as a 'tort, delict or quasi-delict' within the meaning of the Regulation, which means that action can be brought in whichever jurisdiction the wrong took place.
