This thesis aims to examine the intellectual property regimes in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states and assess the relationships between legislation, enforcement mechanisms and sharia law. The GCC states, currently Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, all have varied mechanisms in place for both the implementation and enforcement of intellectual property rights. The thesis pays close attention to the evolution of intellectual property laws and regulations in the GCC states with particular interest directed towards the development of national intellectual property laws within the GCC states from the 1970’s onwards1. Intellectual property protection in the GCC states is considered from two perspectives. The first perspective addresses the international demand for higher standards of intellectual property protection in the GCC states. The second perspective defines intellectual property within the laws of Islam and explores the relationship between Islam and intellectual property. The latter part analyses religious influence, societal and cultural norms, economic reality and the developmental stage of each GCC state. It is an important area of study as developing Muslim countries are struggling with meeting international standards and a successful integrated framework will impact not only on GCC states but other Islamic states and as a result could potentially lead to more informed negotiation in trade agreements with developed states. The research argues there are systematic flaws in the GCC states adopting intellectual property laws which are in essence a procrustean modification of foreign laws which have developed from colonial occupation or laws taken from donor countries. The GCC legal systems of the states have evolved utilising different sets of legal principles and therefore it could be argued the foreign laws that have been adopted are somewhat unsuitable for the GCC states. The research has focused on the implications of the national and international legislative regimes on the protection of intellectual property rights on the GCC states. Consideration is given to compliance, mainly how compliant the GCC is to its World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership and Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP’s) Agreement and to what extent the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) influence the intellectual property protection regimes in the GCC. The research has examined the development of the GCC in three distinct stages; pre-TRIPS, TRIPS compliance stage and TRIPS plus. Furthermore, the thesis argues that the somewhat simplistic formula of the GCC states passing a large number of intellectual property laws to appease the EU and US does not have the significant economic impact on the GCC economy as the international agreements would suggest. Not all trade is intellectual property related and not all foreign direct investment is contingent upon intellectual property protection. However, as the GCC states are largely oil dependent, they do need to diversify their trade and as such an intellectual property protection model that accounts for international intellectual property law and the bespoke cultural and religious views amongst GCC citizens can produce tangible results for both the GCC and its trading partners. What sets the research apart from previous research is two-fold. Firstly, the research is qualitative and has scratched beneath the surface of intellectual property law in the GCC and examined in detail the Islamic law principles that have been used to justify sharia compliance, the western perspective on international intellectual property and the impact of multilateral trade agreements. Secondly, the analysis of Islamic finance and the application of successful sharia compliant models in Islamic finance to intellectual property is innovative as it acts as a springboard to creating a modified sharia compliant intellectual property protection model. Finally, the thesis will conclude by making a series of recommendations to develop an integrated approach to intellectual property rights which takes into account; the structure of the GCC states, international agreements and pressures, the international institutions, Islamic finance and both societal and religious views.

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Yang M. Chang / This paper studies economic factors that affect a multinational’s decision between serving a foreign market via foreign direct investment (FDI) and setting up a joint venture (JV) with a local firm in the host country. The factors that we consider include the substitutability of products produced by competing firms, as well as the hotly debated intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection. In a simple North-South framework, we show that JV is the equilibrium market structure when the degree of R&D spillover is moderate, products are considerably substitutable, and IPRs strong. The government of South needs to maintain a minimum level of IRP to encourage an effective JV. For increasing social welfare, the South also needs to have a policy that limits foreign ownership in a JV.

The purpose of this Thesis is to determine which set of private law rules ought to apply to the use and storage of bodily material. I recommend that the most appropriate legal approach is through a combination of property rights and duties of confidentiality. The suggestion is that where a healthcare institution obtains possession of bodily material, their possession of the material may give rise to property rights in the material. In addition, where an individual retains entitlements in bodily material that is held by a healthcare institution, the entitlements of the individual ought to be protected through the imposition of duties on the healthcare institution that are akin to duties of confidentiality. This recommendation is the product of two main inquires. The first inquiry concerns which entitlements individuals and institutions ought to be able to exercise in separated bodily material. This involves an investigation into which aspects of the relationship between a person and their body can also be found in the relationship between a person and their separated bodily material. It also involves an assessment as to which societal interests can be served through allocating entitlements in bodily material to healthcare institutions, and how to resolve the conflict between individual and societal interests in the use and storage of bodily material. The second main inquiry concerns the way in which different branches of private law are able to protect entitlements in things. I identify that property rights, rights of bodily integrity and privacy are similar insofar as they protect entitlements through the exclusion of others. Property rights are nonetheless distinct as property law concerns rights than can exist independently of the rights-holder. The recommended approach follows from connecting the different entitlements in bodily material that ought to obtain legal protection with different ways an entitlement may be afforded legal protection.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the possibility of promoting social justice through the direct confrontation and rectification of manifest injustices in our existing social institutions and practices, as opposed to the more conventional theoretical approach of attempting to offer comprehensive accounts of ideal justice based on the identification of ultimate principles of justice or perfectly just institutional arrangements. Through an analysis and moral evaluation of the intergenerational transfer of wealth through the practice of inheritance, the study attempts to illustrate how a narrower theoretical focus on specific existing social institutions and practices will enhance conceptual clarity regarding their morally relevant features and, by taking the actual social and political context into account from the outset, increase the political and real-world relevance of the resulting proposal. This study also offers a thorough examination of property rights, because an understanding of the nature of ownership and the justificatory theories of entitlement claims necessarily provides the background context against which the issue of inheritance has to be addressed. As property rights give specific people claims to resources to the exclusion of others, any considerations on property rights also brings up questions of distributive and social justice. Within this broader framework of property rights and distributive justice, this study seeks to show that inheritance is not only inconsistent with the values underlying capitalism, but also an unfair and outdated practice that helps to perpetuate economic and social inequality, which undermines the ideal of democratic citizenship. To this end, a proposal is made to cap inheritance by placing an upper limit to the amount an individual will be allowed to bequeath to any other individual(s). It is argued that this limit should be high enough to allow for the transfer of a family home and objects with sentimental value, but not so high as to ensure a life of complete leisure to future generations. The merits of inheritance taxation will then be discussed in detail and arguments in favour of limiting inheritance will be subdivided into three broad categories: The first concerns the legitimacy of the practice of inheritance itself, as well as the tension between the liberal-democratic principles underlying capitalism and the practice of inheritance, the second relates to the undesirability of the social outcomes that are realised based on the practice of inheritance, and the third focuses on the potential gains that the alternative arrangement will bring. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die tesis ondersoek die moontlikheid dat sosiale geregtigheid deur die direkte konfrontasie en regstelling van ongeregtighede in ons bestaande instellings en praktyke bevorder kan word, in teenstelling met die meer konvensionele teoretiese benadering wat poog om alomvattende teorieë van ideale geregtigheid op die identifikasie van finale beginsels van geregtigheid of volmaakte institusionele organisering te baseer. Die studie poog om deur die analise en morele evaluering van die praktyk van erflating te illustreer dat ‘n nouer teoretiese fokus op spesifieke bestaande sosiale instellings en praktyke die konseptuele duidelikheid aangaande hul moreel relevante aspekte kan verbeter, en dat die relevansie van voorstellings verhoog kan word deur die werklike politieke en sosiale konteks uit die staanspoor in ag te neem. Die studie bied ook ‘n deeglike analise van eiendomsreg aan, omdat ‘n begrip van die aard van eienaarskap en die teorieë wat besitsreg regverdig noodwendig die agtergrond konteks skep waarteen die kwessie van erflating aangespreek moet word. Omdat eiendomsreg vir spesifieke mense regte tot hulpbronne gee tot die uitsluiting van ander, bring enige oorwegings aangaande eiendomsreg ook die kwessie van sosiale geregtigheid na vore. Binne hierdie breër raamwerk van eiendomsreg en sosiale geregtigheid, poog die studie om te wys dat erflating nie net teenstrydig is met die waardes onderliggend aan kapitalisme nie, maar ook 'n onregverdige en verouderde praktyk is wat bydra tot die voortbestaning van ekonomiese en sosiale ongelykheid, en dus die ideaal van demokratiese burgerskap ondermyn. Die studie stel voor dat erflating beperk moet word deur ‘n limiet te plaas op die bedrag wat enige persoon van ander persone af kan erf. Die meriete van erflatingsbelasting word in detail bespreek en argumente ten gunste van ‘n limiet op erflatings word breedweg in drie kategorieë verdeel: Die eerste betref die legitimiteit van die praktyk van erflating self, sowel as die spanning tussen die liberaal-demokratiese beginsels onderliggend aan kapitalisme en die praktyk van erflating; die tweede het betrekking tot die onaanvaarbare sosiale uitkomste wat ontstaan vanweë die praktyk van erflating; en die derde fokus op die verbeteringe wat alternatiewe praktyke kan bring.

Since the 1990s, South Korea has enthusiastically developed and applied digital technologies to every sector of economic and social life, and constructed the most intensively connected society in the world. This thesis explores the impact of Digital Korea on the country s cultural industries, focussing particularly on the main audio-visual industries of broadcasting and film. While the push to digitalise Korea has been enthusiastically pursued by successive national governments with the aim of ensuring that Korea maintains its status as a key world economy as the leading edge of capitalism shifts from an industrial to an information base, to fully understand the forms it has taken and its impacts national initiatives have to be placed in the wider context of shifts in the global trading system. With the rise of neo-liberalism across the globe and the perceived ineffectiveness of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in extending multi-lateral trade, both emerging and developed economies have increasingly embraced Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). In line with this trend, South Korea has signed FTAs with the USA, the European Union (EU) and The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This thesis explores the interplay between national initiatives and global trade through a detailed case study of the US-led FTA with South Korea (KORUS-FTA) focusing particularly on its implications for the Audiovisual Sector and the accompanying, and pivotal, debates around Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). The KORUS FTA simultaneously opened the Korean market to American audiovisual content and strengthened existing national IPR laws to match the provisions prevailing within the US. Both these moves were opposed within Korea on the grounds that they operated unequally, to the advantage of the US and the detriment of national production that had, in recent years, enjoyed considerable success in export markets, creating what came to be known as the Korean Wave . In addition utilising the extensive corpus of available public documentation the analysis presented here draws on two original research exercises: in depth interviews with experts in international trade and intellectual property rights, conducted in South Korea, the UK and Switzerland (in Geneva, at the WTO Forum 2008), and a web-based survey of a cross section of professionals working in the Korean broadcasting industry. The results obtained show that while Korean economists followed the government in arguing that signing the FTA with the US was essential if Korea was to remain a major player in the global economy, a majority of those working in the audiovisual sector believed that the terms of the agreement, particularly the imposition of US-style IPR laws, disproportionately favoured US interests and would weaken the strong position the sector had achieved in recent years and impede its future growth.

The tremendous spreading of multimedia via Internet motivates the watermarking as a new promising technology for copyright protection. This work is concerned with the design and development of novel algorithms in the spatial and transform domains for robust and secure watermarking of coloured images. These algorithms are adaptive, content-dependent and compatible with the Human Visual System (HVS). The host channels have the ability to host a large information payload. Furthermore, it has enough capacity to accept multiple watermarks. Abstract This work achieves several contributions in the area of coloured images watermarking. The most challenging problem is to get a robust algorithm that can overcome geometric attacks, which is solved in this work. Also, the search for a very secure algorithm has been achieved via using double secret keys. In addition, the problem of multiple claims of ownership is solved here using an unusual approach. Furthermore, this work differentiates between terms, which are usually confusing the researchers and lead to misunderstanding in most of the previous algorithms. One of the drawbacks in most of the previous algorithms is that the watermark consists of a small numbers of bits without strict meaning. This work overcomes this weakness III in using meaningful images and text with large amounts of data. Contrary to what is found in literature, this work shows that the green-channel is better than the blue-channel to host the watermarks. A more general and comprehensive test bed besides a broad band of performance evaluation is used to fairly judge the algorithms.

Access to land is crucial for combating discrimination. Women who are denied such access tend to be disadvantaged, a pattern that results in economic powerlessness. Tanzana is among the most undeveloped nations in the world, where gender inequalities with respect to accessing land are central problems. This study consequently aims at investigating women's access to land through customary land tenure in the Makete district in Tanzania. A case study strategy was adopted to address the research problem, whereby interviews, focus group discussions and documentary reviews were the main data collection methods. The findings indicate that the majority of women within villages are illiterate; unaware of any existing entitlements and lacking insufficient assets to fight for their rights, and that their involvement in land administration institutions is limited. At the familiy level, daughters and women are deprived of any right to possess land through inheritance because relatives believe they will be married to other families from which they will then gain access to land. This generally has been proven not to be the case. After marriage, women commonly are apportioned land strictly for crop cultivation (usufruct rights). Consequently, there are many challenges in realising women's property rights in Tanzania. These challenges include the dualisim of the property rights system: customary tenure operates alongside statutory tenure; inadequate knowledge about women's property rights by both women and men; negative attitudes towards women's influence, position, capability and reputation; outdated customs; archaic and conflicting interests in laws; and lack of legal capacity (empowerment) as to property rights. The most important tools for meeting these challenges include education and awareness campaigns that are designed to build the capacity of citizens as to the necessity of equity in access to property rights (land) using various legal tools at varying levels. Other measures include amending and repealing outdated laws, including provisons dicriminating against women's property rights and contradicting constitutional provisons and other international instruments. Other avenues are advocacy and working for behavioural chages can also be invoked by empowering individuals at all stages of life, supporting their involvement in productive activities and creating group networks, and facilitating the formation of community-based organisations as well as building capacity by mainstreaming land adminstration institutions. / <p>QC 20170315</p>

This thesis aims to investigate determinants of fear of failure in entrepreneurial activity that could inhibit starting a business. The study uses cross-sectional, pooled OLS, and panel regressions. The dependent variable is fear of failure regarding entrepreneurship, measured with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey question of whether fear of failure would prevent the responder from starting a firm. The unit of analysis is at country level. I categorize determinants into demographic, property rights, and procedural variables. A population of higher working age ratio (measured as the population aged 15-64 divided by the population aged 65 and over) correlates with a decreasing fear of failure. Additionally, stronger property rights appear to decrease fear of failure. I do not find a statistically significant relationship between fear of failure and procedural variables in my datasets. A binary variable for whether the country is in Asia appears to show a positive association with fear of failure, increasing it by ten percentage points. Since decreasing fear of failure is desirable to promote greater entrepreneurial activity, a better understanding of the determinants of fear of failure is essential to inform public policies to spur entrepreneurial growth. The findings from this study, while not conclusive, identify the importance of further research based on larger datasets and variables that are more robust.

Aside from the introduction and conclusion, this thesis comprises four core chapters: The first chapter investigates the presence of endogenous peer effects in the adoption of formal property rights. Using data from a unique land titling experiment held in an unplanned settlement in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I show a strong, positive impact of neighbour adoption on the household’s choice to purchase a land title. I also show that this relationship holds in a separate, identical experiment held a year later in a nearby community, as well as in administrative data for approximately 45,000 land parcels in the same city. I also discuss possible channels, including the possibility of complementarities in the reduction in expropriation risk. The second chapter examines the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the demand for formal land tenure. Using a unique census of two highly fractionalised settle- ments in Dar es Salaam, I show that households located near coethnics are significantly less likely to purchase a limited form of land tenure recently offered by the government. I attempt to address one of the chief concerns, endogenous sorting of households, by con- ditioning on a households choice of neighbors upon arrival in the neighborhood. These results suggest that close-knit ethnic groups may be less likely to accept state-provided goods if they can generate reasonable substitutes. The third chapter is a short chapter which presents results from a recent policy experi- ment in Tanzania where formal land titles were provided to informal settlers at randomised prices. Land owners were also randomly assigned conditional discounts, which could only be applied if a woman was designated as owner or co-owner of the land in question. Results show that conditionality has no adverse effects on demand for land titles, yet drastically increases the probability a woman is included. We discuss the implications of these results for the expected bargaining power impacts of the intervention. The final chapter investigates birth order effects on both anthropometric and edu- cation outcomes in a longitudinal survey of children from the Philippines. Birth order effects are present early in life for both outcomes, but attenuate as children approach adulthood. There is also evidence for nonlinear birth order effects, with both firstborn and lastborn children holding an advantage over middleborn children. These results are at odds with prevalent theories of birth order which predict lasting and monotonic differences in outcomes across children.

‘Additive’ goods and services are defined as those that improve with use. They are not naturally rival, or even non-rival, but are “anti-rival.” Information is an example. Information can be made excludable through the use of patents and copyrights, however this does not necessarily lead to socially optimal production and allocation. A more flexible, open access, and decentralized process for the production and allocation of information could improve social welfare. This dissertation describes the challenges and problems with privatizing and restricting access to information and reviews alternative mechanisms for its allocation. Two particular issues at opposite ends of the access spectrum are: (1) strict barriers to private industry databases and (2) quality perception and control of open access information. The first chapter discusses our current system of producing and distributing information and potential ways to stimulate the transition to a new regime. This paper concludes that some of the ideas to seed such a transition include: (1) redefining wellbeing metrics; (2) ensuring the wellbeing of populations during the transition; (3) reducing complexity and increase resilience within institutions; (4) expanding the “commons sector”; and (4) using the internet to remove communication barriers and improve democracy. The second chapter discusses our current system of determining which information to produce, which resources to allocate towards the production of information, and how to distribute that information once produced. The paper concludes that alternative incentive methods, both inside and outside of the market, of producing information and new methods for distributing it to those that can make best use of it, would improve social welfare. These include: (1) prizes; (2) non-monetary incentives; (3) capping salaries; (4) research consortium; and (5) publicly funded research. Chapter 3 explores the difficulty in determining basic energy information under the current proprietary information system using an analysis of the energy return on investment (EROI) of wind energy. It utilizes a meta-analysis of the energy return on investment (EROI) to obtain basic information about the energy inputs and outputs necessary for the manufacturing, installing, operating, and decommissioning of wind turbines. This analysis shows an average EROI for all studies (operational and conceptual) of 25.2 (n=114; std. dev.=22.3). It concludes that making information proprietary severely limits the accuracy of EROI estimates and increases the difficulty of making the best social choices. Chapter 4 explores the perceived credibility of web-based information using an experiment with Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and the Encyclopedia of Earth. Compared to Encyclopedia Britannica, both Encyclopedia of Earth and Wikipedia were found to provide a statistically negative perception of credibility. The other factors analyzed (presence or absence of an author, references, a biased sponsor, or an award) contribute to “brand equity” a composite characteristic that takes significant time to develop. The relatively new Encyclopedia of Earth has not yet developed enough brand recognition to affect credibility one-way or the other, but its positive characteristics should help build the brand and credibility over time.