Re: [ossig] can the ossig community help to do something +ve ?

["Raja Iskandar Shah" <ris.riscniaga@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

totally agree with you dude.

very  worrying when the top most authority in this country does not
understand the difference between copyright and licensing, and
intellectual property. some of the oss community members is also partly
to blame for quoting copy'left'. i do know that microsoft has an active
campaign in this country to confuse this issue.

at the basic level, the copyright laws of malaysia says that once you
publish your work (e.g. software, music, book, blog, article, research)
on a media (paper, electronic, etc), then you are automatically the
copyright owner of that work for a certain number of years. that work
becomes your intellectual property and you can do whatever you want to
with your intellectual property, including licensing (oss or proprietary
or whatever) it to other people. as the copyright owner, you can even
have multiple versions under different licensing.

however if you have copied / 'ciplak' your work from someone else's work
without that other person's permission or license, then your copyright
work has infringed on that other person's copyright. but this
infringement is only on that portion that you have copied. the rest of
the work that you have honestly done, is still your copyright property.

i think this is the first thing that mimos needs to address with the
govt, the industry and the users.

a kind note to developers, if you are developing something using oss,
please do it in a modular fashion where it is easier to separate your
work from the oss work. if you can run / develop your application with
the oss software binaries (without requiring the source codes), then you
will have more control over your work. the problem with malaysian
companies / programmers is that they tend to 'copy-and-paste' source
codes from other software and including it as part of their proprietary
software.

Raja Iskandar Shah
http://riscniaga.netfirms.com

----- Original Message -----
From: Dinesh Nair <dinesh@alphaque.com>
Date: Thursday, May 27, 2004 11:52 am
Subject: Re: [ossig] can the ossig community help to do something +ve ?

> 
> On Thu, 27 May 2004, Raja Iskandar Shah wrote:
> 
> > there are totally confused about oss. they do not seem to understand
> > that oss is a form of copyright and licensed work. their 
> understanding> that oss will dilute malaysia's stand on 
> intellectual property. we need
> 
> many do not realise that a copyright and a license are two different
> animals. what confuses them is that i hold copyright, but license 
> my work
> under a free to use/distribute license. they confuse this action 
> with also
> giving away copyright. i once had a very "interesting" argument 
> with a
> supposedly IP lawyer for a large quasi-government agency on this very
> issue. oddly, all the non-legal people in the room got it, but she 
> didnt.
> Regards,                           /\_/\   "All dogs go to heaven."
> dinesh@alphaque.com                (0 0)    http://www.alphaque.com/
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