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The Intellectual
Property (Miscellaneous Amendments) Ordinance 2000
By
Annie Yu
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On
As of 1 April 2001, the captioned ordinance has taken effect and
one of the aims of the amended laws is to combat corporate copyright
piracy activities. In order to avoid any violation of the laws,
all departments and their research centres must ensure that legal
copies and sufficient licences for the software installed or to
be installed on their Staff LAN servers, Student LAN or any other
servers, individual PCs and/or workstations were or will be acquired,
and that their licensing conditions are complied with or will
be rectified. If the checking exercise is not done properly, the
University may be liable to prosecution.
To
help departments verify whether a particular piece of software
is covered by a Central Licence, the Computing Services Centre
(CSC) has compiled several lists of Centrally Licensed PC Software
accessible at the following URLs:
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareCWIN95.htm
for Chinese Windows 95,
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareWIN95.htm
for English Windows 95,
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareCWIN98.htm
for Chinese Windows 98, and
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareWIN98.htm
for English Windows 98
As most of
the University staff are now on Windows 98, naturally DOS and
Windows 95 platforms will be phased out this summer. If you still
have application software running on these operating systems,
it is strongly recommended that new or updated versions should
be purchased without delay, because sooner or later they will
be run on Windows 98.
Licence issues
are also concerns for software that was provided by departments
but is currently installed either on central host machines or
on Student LAN servers/clients in the CSC Student Terminal Rooms.
These cases will be dealt with individually.
In order to
enforce legitimate use of software, from now on, all CSC Work
Request Forms for software installation must be accompanied by
a duly signed “Declaration of Legitimacy of Software for
Installation” form.
For further
details and reference on the copyright laws, please refer to “Copyright
in Education in Hong Kong”, a bilingual booklet produced
by the HKSAR’s Intellectual Property Department (IPD). To
find the booklet on the Web, go to the IPD’s homepage (http://www.info.gov.hk/ipd/),
select “Information and Study Aids”, and then “Publication”.
The Frequently
Asked Questions for the captioned Ordinance can be found under
“FAQ” on the Web site of IPD.
For the summaries
of the Hong Kong’s Intellectual Property Legislation, Circulars,
forms and publications issued by the IPD, please select “IP
Laws and Forms” on the IPD’s homepage.
For how to
better manage your software property, please refer to:
http://www.bsa.org/usa/freetools/business/gsmus.phtml
For a better
understanding on the software licensing conditions, please refer
to:
http://www.kenfil.com./software_store/software_licensing/understand_license.asp
