A different kind of war: Internet databases and legal protection or how the strict intellectual property laws of the West threaten the developing countries’ information commons

This paper describes intellectual property legislation in the European Union, the US and the Draft Treaty onthe legal protection of unoriginal databases, usually available in the Internet. I argue that this type oflegislation, if enforced upon developing countries and countries in transition through international‘agreements’, could in effect deprive them of their own information commons, their own public domain. Withexamples from China, India, Africa and Iceland, I argue that this deprivation in the case of developingcountries is, morally, equal to a virtual war against them by the West, wholly unjustified and dangerous-anexample of virtual imperialism.