You are a creative person.
You love to write. You love to paint. You have so many ideas in your head.
You write your ideas on the paper. You translate your emotions into a lovely paintings or music. You craft a wonderful art. You invent a unique products or services.
Once you transformed your ideas into a permanent form, you own that final ‘product’. It is your product unless you are working with a company who pays your salary to invent those ‘products’. In that situation, the final ‘product’ is not yours. It’s belong to the company or whoever commissioned you for the work. However, if your job scope does not require you to invent a ‘product’ but you did it out of passion, then it is your own product and you have the rights over the product rather than your company.
Byrne v Statist Co.
Financial Times (FT) got Byrne to translate the message for an agreed fee. Byrne did not make the translation in pursuance of any duty owed by him to the FT as one of their staffs or in the course of his employment by them, but his employment to translate was an independent engagement outside his ordinary duties and was done entirely in his own time. Why? Because Byrne is a journalist employed by a newspaper co. to undertake a translation he made for an advertisement which subsequently appeared in his paper because it called on his skills as a speaker of Portuguese rather than his skills as a journalist. Held – the translation was an original literary work belong to Byrne.
Another example is the case of Merchandising Corp of America Inc & ors v Harpbond Ltd & ors it was held that a facial make-up was not a painting within section 3* of the Copyright Act 1956 (UK Act). Why? Because a painting must be on the surface & must be permanent. Our face is not a permanent form, unless you take a photograph of the painting – then it will fall under different category.
This topic is too big to discuss and as an introduction, I am giving you the idea that your ideas is your intellectual property which can be protected under the law. What you need to know is, which category your ideas will fall into and how to protect them? Before you do that, you should equip yourself with knowledge on intellectual property as it is not as simple as it seems.
My challenge is to challenge your ideas whether it is really protected under the law. If you know anyone out there who has infringed your protected IP, do let me know. But make sure your IP is already protected because you are an intelligent people.
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*Note : s. 3 – Copyright in artistic works Malaysian Copyright Act 1987 – s. 8 (1) (a) – translations, adaptations, arrangements and other transformation of works eligible for copyright
