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

[Uwe Dippel <udippel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raja Iskandar Shah wrote:

> 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.

... Which is not very much 'Malaysian'.
Malaysia signed the 'Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial 
Property' on January 1, 1989;
and the 'Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic 
Works' on October 1, 1990.

They simply followed the prescribed, necessary implementation of the 
rules laid down there into National Law.

http://www.wipo.int

gets you further with all of this; in case you're interested.

Everything is in there; including the dilemma cited by Dinesh.
The 'Paris Convention' says:

"The countries [...] undertake, ex officio if their legislation so 
permits, *or* at the request of an interested party ..."

(Article 6bis), Sentence 1
(This is the passage for trademarks; but it applies to copyrights similarly)

This is about the only liberty left to the signatories.

> 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.

This is kind of misleading and I doubt that your opinion is derived from 
the law. I hope it isn't, at least.
Derivative works do not permit you to have own rights on them, as long 
as you infringe on the original (the thing with the 'fruit' comes in 
here). Of course, your work (of art or whatsoever) belongs to you; but 
you have no entitlement over it as long as the smallest part constitutes 
an infringement. The liability is carried with the product.
If you copy a XP-CD and print the reverse with a really nice, attractive 
picture drawn entirely by yourself, you are void of any rights on that 
product and can't sell it legally any place. The information on that 
other side of the CD isn't yours. Over.

Dinesh is right; in this country there is an astonishing amount of 
people who *believe* that 'copy-a-bit-here-and-copy-a-bit-from-there' 
makes them the owner of a great product (at least personally I happened 
to notice an unusually high percentage of such believers in here); which 
in turn they will *vigorously* defend against anyone who ever dares to 
do the same with their product.

Education. Education. Education.


Uwe


-- 
Linux.  You can find a worse OS, but it costs more.


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