ONE month ago, the controversial FPB amendment bill was passed by South Africa's Parliament. It came as a major blow to online content providers battling prior restraint and other apartheid-era laws from a previous period of newsroom censorship, and will ostensibly turn ISPs into cops, tasked wit...

FIN24, the Naspers-Media24 financial news site has been found guilty on one count of copyright infringement. The South Gauteng High Court found that Fin24 infringed the copyright of one Moneyweb article in 2013, after copying and republishing a substantial part of an original article, and was ord...

DO YOU remember when the internet still spread hope? After its invention in the‘80s, we had access to a mass of information, sites such as Napster allowed us to share so-called “private property” easily and, most importantly, we could publish what we had to say ourselves – and people actually lis...

Copyright is not a right, but a commercial privilege. It is used by authors and artists to control the sale of copies of original work which would otherwise fall into the public domain. As such it is a legal fiction invented by law professionals, who often ignore the rights of others, those who m...

In 1909, Gandhi wrote "Hind Swaraj" and in 1910 the English translation was published as "Indian Home Rule". This is a photograph of a rare copy of the work (it isn't usually available, even in major museums and Gandhi archives), and the copyright legend on it reads: "No rights reserved." The boo...