Ramble on
A complete treatment of this topic would probably take up a number of hefty volumes so this chapter is not intended to cover all aspects of doing business in South Africa. There are many brilliant, knowledgeable and expert writers and professionals in South Africa who could speak far more authoritatively on the range of topics that fall under the general header of “SA Inc and the business of doing business in South Africa”.
Instead I am going to mention two topics which I am both passionate about, regard as two very hot topics in the near future and which are, themselves, are subjects of entire books and which SA Business should bear in mind when doing business in South Africa: privacy and content licensing. These topics are going to be of interest for those businesses which are interested in or involved in the growing social media space.
While content licensing and privacy are the topics that tend to attract the most attention when I chat to business people about them, freedom of expression and unlawful competition are two topics I won’t deal with in this chapter due to space considerations in the context of this blook as a whole but which are arguably equally important. Which topics are more relevant and therefore important to you may be a matter of perspective depending on what your focus may be at a given point in time.
Privacy
Privacy has always been an issue business has had to tackle although not terribly vigorously. Privacy issues in the workplace have often included personal communications and personal relationships in the workplace and have been dealt with through internal policies on issues ranging from the acceptable use of the organisation’s IT infrastructure to policies that deal with the prickly topic of sexual harassment.
The need to give substance to the right to privacy in the Bill of Rights and the increasing amount of personal information that is becoming available both online and offline in all spheres (and the growing need to safeguard that potentially sensitive information) have given rise to draft legislation presently doing the rounds in our legislature.
This is not a new process and in many ways the draft legislation mirrors developments abroad, including in the European Union. Without going into the legislation in much detail (yet another volume in itself), it defines personal information and through a series of voluntary and mandatory mechanisms it seeks to strike a balance between the need to safeguard personal information when processed by public (for example, government bodies) and private (for example, businesses) bodies, the need to protect and give substance to the right to privacy and the desire to facilitate the appropriate flow of personal information.
I use an extract from the draft legislation in a presentation I give on these topics and in which I highlight some of the examples of personal information. Although few people can actually read the extract in the slide because the font is so small, the highlights demonstrate the fairly broad scope of the definition and highlight the need to take a more active interest in how this draft legislation may impact on South African businesses.
An unfortunate consequence of a growing complexity of issues pertinent to business is that it is necessary to introduce a range of measures to reduce and manage the risks that accompany this growing complexity. One of these measures, at least in this context, is a clear privacy policy that informs both internal stakeholders and customers what personal information the company is collecting and how that personal information is being used. These uses are guided by the draft legislation and it is vital that this information be communicated to these people.
The draft legislation also envisages imposing a series of obligations on businesses to secure their stores of personal information and to retain that personal information subject to specified guidelines. Add a range of exemptions and prohibitions to the mix and businesses are facing a far more complex privacy landscape which needs to be navigated with considerable care.
Bottom line: things are about to become really interesting in this space.
Content licensing
For the most part Business SA either doesn’t think too much about copyright or views it as a shield to protect it from the horrors that ravage the intellectual property countryside that include plagiarists and unimaginative bloggers who are too loose with the “Copy” and “Paste” commands.
Copyright certainly has a valuable place in that intellectual property countryside. One of its most important functions is to protect original content and, in the process, it encourages content creators to develop more original content. The difficulty with copyright is that, as a bundle of exclusive rights, it does not always fit in well with the growing social media trend (if you can call it that) and with consumers’ desires and habits.
One question I often ask people is how many of them tend to download or copy interesting content they see on the Web without thinking too much about little things like who owns the copyright in that content and whether consuming that content in that way is consistent with the copyright owner’s intentions and rights. At the risk of oversimplifying the issues, people want to go online and freely share what they find with their friends, family and colleagues. This act of sharing often takes the form of copied text and images being distributed by email, printed out and passed around or even incorporated into blogs and other online social media platforms.
The problem with this tendency, of course, is that many of these uses are forms of copyright infringement and while there are a number of exceptions to general copyright infringement the exceptions themselves are sometimes not terribly clear or helpful.
There is an alternative to simply relying on the protections afforded by copyright and its exceptions to copyright infringement. If your goal, as a content creator, is to ensure that your content is made available to the biggest audience possible within certain parameters which may protect your business model, the integrity of your content or ensure that any sharing perpetuates your open access ambitions then you will be thinking about some form of license for your content. The immediate challenge is how to properly license your content and make sure that the considerations that need to be addressed are, in fact addressed.
One option is to go to an attorney have have a custom made license prepared. A license will grant its user certain rights in the content concerned which, in turn, will enable the user to make use of the content in a way that would ordinarily be prohibited. This has its advantages because you will have a license that does exactly what you want it to do (that is, permit certain uses and prohibit others). The disadvantages include the costs involved and the possible inability to understand the terms of the license unless you have degrees in Latin and advanced legalese.
The second option will be far more appealing to many content creators. Creative Commons licenses are ready made content licences that permit a range of uses of content depending on the license adopted (there are six core licenses). These licenses are customisable to a degree in that you can choose which elements to include in your license to supplement elements that are built into every Creative Commons license, such as the ability to share the content privately, the requirement that authors of the content concerned be attributed properly and the perpetual term of the licenses. The rights granted by a Creative Commons license may include the ability to create a derivative work of the content (something like a remix of a song, perhaps?), the right to exploit a work commercially or perhaps the requirement that adaptations of the content be distributed under a similar Creative Commons license.
One thing for SA Business to bear in mind, especially in the push to integrate social media into an online presence, is that Creative Commons licenses can be powerful tools which can be used to help spread content as widely as possible. This makes a lot of sense where a business has a blog or otherwise publishes its content on the Web with the intention that it reach as many people as possible. Additional protocols like the recently introduced CC+ protocol enable businesses to integrate their commercial licenses into a non-commercial Cretive Commons license. One benefit of this is to present a licensed version of the content that can be freely shared while preserving a commercial model. A good example of a service that uses a similar model is the popular tutorial service, Common Craft.
What I constantly find remarkable about these legal constructs is the very real impact they can have on creative expression. Although copyright was originally intended to protect and promote creative expression, it has become almost synonymous with protectionism and restrictions on content usage. It is unfortunate but it has paved the way for tools like Creative Commons licenses and similar free content licenses to free content creators to express themselves more freely secure in the knowledge that they have struck a balance between sharing and spreading their ideas and passions and, at the same time, ensuring that their content is used in a way that best achieves that expression. Just what form that expression takes and how it manifests will vary from one content creator to another, whether that content creator be an artist, a writer or Chief Executive blogging about his hopes and dreams for his company.
Levelling off
Without a doubt privacy and content licensing are critical issues that SA Business needs to pay careful attention to, especially as more and more local businesses provide services and publish content online. Two topics I wasn’t able to deal with in this chapter introduce further dimensions of complexity and perhaps greater challenges for many businesses: freedom of expression and unlawful competition. These seemingly unrelated topics come together in a very interesting and yet somewhat disturbing way for many businesses in the context of social media in particular and also merit very careful consideration.
One message I try to communicate whenever I speak about these topics is that as much as they may complicate an already confusing landscape, the risks they represent can (and should) be managed and, in the process, reduced. Doing so requires a little research and planning but the benefits of these foundational steps will soon become apparent in a variety of ways, all of which add to the tremendous promise and potential of doing business in South Africa.
Now read the rest of the blook chapters:
Introduction
1. The new South Africa – is it real?
2. Is SA rich or poor?
3. What the world thinks of South Africa and what our global opportunities are
4. The importance of each individual’s contribution collectively
5. SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA
6. The beauty and grandeur that surrounds us
7. The importance of technology in SA’s global emergence
8. Building brand South Africa
9. Making the most of SA’s creative talents and abilities
10. Innovate for a better South Africa
11. The role of the younger generation in SA, and what we need to do to support them
12. Connecting South Africa – Communities that transcend technology
13. We are African – the role of collaboration in South Africa’s growth
Chapter 5, SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA by Paul Jacobson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 South Africa License.
Based on a work at pauljacobson.org.
Technorati Tags:
content licensing, copyright, creative commons, south africa, blook, sa blook, opportunities, privacy, legislation, sa business
Nokia’s insistence on supporting Windows almost exclusively is a sure recipe for disaster. While I understand that Windows is still on the majority of computers around the world, the longer Nokia ignores the Mac OS and Linux, the closer it will come to giving up its place as market leader to Apple or the Linux-based mobile device market in the next few years.
On the other end of the spectrum we are going to see a variety of Linux based devices emerge with even more user friendly interfaces. 
There is a debate about LinkedIn’s utility in the face of apparently growing numbers of lawyers joining and maintaining profiles on the service on 
