According to Britz (1996:36), the ethical issue of property can be defined as any tangible matter over which a person can exercise certain rights, such as using, enjoying, and excluding other people from a possession. Copyright is one of a number of examples of intellectual property. Cornish (2004:1), Flint (1979:6), and Cornish (1989:245) define the term copyright as a body of legal rights that protects creative works from being reproduced, performed, or disseminated by others without permission. The owner of the copyright has the exclusive right to reproduce a protected work; to prepare derivative works that only slightly change the protected work; to sell or lend copies of the protected work to the public; to perform protected works in public for profit; and to display copyrighted works publicly (Cornish, 2004:2). Britz (1996) is of the opinion that the question of the ownership of information and the protection of the author’s interest is becoming increasingly blurred and threatened by technology. This is mainly because technology enables information to be copied and disseminated faster and easier than ever before, without the recognition of the original author. Mason (1986:4) suggests that information has some unique characteristics that create catastrophic problems with regard to the issue of intellectual property. He believes that the fact that information is sharable and ownership still retained, poses a question of whether information can, in fact, be stolen. Furthermore, information can be extremely expensive to produce in the first place. Yet, once it is produced, that information has the illusive quality of being easy to reproduce and to share with others. Moreover, this replication can take place without destroying the original.
