Steyn was speaking to the Business Hour, regarding copyright laws in South Africa on Thursday (15 April). He explains that copyrights automatically come into existence when a creation or artwork is made, i.e. books, poems, films, software etc. In other words in South Africa, there is no formal registration process for copyrights upon the creation of a piece of “work”.

Steyn says there is a great deal of uniformity when it comes to intellectual property laws across different countries. He attributes this to international intellectual treaties like the Berne Convention for the Protection of literary and artistic works which forces member states and/or signatories of the treaty to implement similar legislation at a local/national level, resulting in this uniformity.

Steyn does caution, there are some slight differences. He says for example in the United States, if a company commissions work to a third party, the product/works belong to the commissioning company, whereas in South Africa, the creator of the product – in this case the third party – would have first dibs on the copyright of the product. He says he has also noticed that in the United States people register copyrights for the purpose of using the registration in litigation processes. He says that these are but some of the slight nuances and differences in intellectual property laws across different countries.

Steyn emphasises the importance of entrepreneurs and business owners, in general, being aware of how these intellectual property rights can be monetised and lead to bigger commercial opportunities. He references a client of his in the country who was roped in to develop software for a certain company. Once the work was completed, Steyn’s client wanted to protect the intellectual property of the software he had created. He had to find out that he did not technically own the copyright on the software and to make matters worse, the company he created the software for was in the process of licensing the software out to a company in South Africa.