Privacy V. Piracy

While the title suggests some inherent conflict between ‘privacy rights’ and ‘intellectual property rights’, this isn’t necessarily the case. In most situations, privacy rights and IP rights don’t compete with each other. This is because privacy rights are focussing on protecting the private life of individuals (broadly speaking), while IP rights are often focussing on the protection of publicly distributed materials and information (the law of confidentiality, perhaps being a slight exception to the latter). So, for a long time, their paths haven’t needed to cross all that often. However, the distribution of intellectual property content such as books, films, and music is increasingly electronic and new technology, such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), is becoming more popular amongst copyright owners, enabling the monitoring of private ‘consumption’ of their content. Also, the possibility of significant IP infringing acts taking place at home is increasing, through the