By Amir Murshidi
Every so often, a technology arrives that makes copyright law look old. The printing press did it. The photocopier did it. Generative AI is doing it now and Malaysia is meeting it with the Copyright Act 1987, a statute older than the web browser.
Nearly four decades after the Copyright Act 1987 came into force, the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO) has unveiled what may become Malaysia’s most comprehensive copyright reform in recent history. Importantly, MyIPO is not reforming the law behind closed doors. As part of the consultation process, MyIPO is inviting copyright owners, creators, legal practitioners, industry players, educational institutions and the public to share their views through the regulatory impact analysis framework, ensuring that the reforms are informed by practical industry experience.
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A Law Written Before Google, Social Media and AI
When Malaysia enacted the Copyright Act in 1987, the internet was still in its infancy. Digital streaming, cloud storage, online marketplaces, generative AI and social media platforms were unimaginable. While the Act has undergone periodic amendments, many of its core concepts remain rooted in a pre-digital era.
Today’s copyright landscape bears little resemblance to that of 1987. Creative works now circulate globally within seconds, online piracy has become increasingly sophisticated, while AI continues to reshape how content is created and commercialised.
Against this backdrop, incremental amendments are no longer sufficient. What Malaysia requires is a paradigm shift that balances innovation, commercial certainty and creators’ rights
Reforms That Could Reshape Malaysia's Copyright Landscape
Among the most notable proposals is the introduction of dynamic injunctions against online piracy. Unlike conventional injunctions, which often become ineffective when infringing websites simply migrate to new domains, dynamic injunctions would allow enforcement orders to extend to mirror or successor websites. Such mechanisms have already proven effective in jurisdictions such as Singapore and the United Kingdom.
The Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) is the reform with the most obvious moral force, partly because the injustice it fixes is so easy to state. An artist sells a painting for RM2,000. Years later, the same canvas changes hands for RM2 million. Under the current Act, the artist gets nothing, not a ringgit of the value their own reputation created. ARR gives artists a royalty on qualifying resales. France has recognised a version of this for over a century. The United Kingdom and Australia followed. It will not make anyone rich. It simply corrects something that has been quietly unfair for a long time.
Orphan works are the unglamorous reform, and possibly the most culturally important one. Libraries, museums, archives and universities across the country sit on photographs, manuscripts and recordings whose copyright owners simply cannot be found. Without a lawful route to use them, institutions are often left with only one option, to do nothing, and the material stays in boxes. A statutory mechanism permitting their use, subject to proper safeguards, would let that heritage back into the light without abandoning copyright principles.
Then there is the Copyright Tribunal. On paper, a forum for royalty dispute, in practice, often a locked door. Under the current Act, a dispute proceeds only if both the licensing body and its member consent, which means either side can block the referral, and the side benefiting from the status quo usually does. The amendments would let either party bring the dispute independently, with a decision due within 60 days of the hearing’s conclusion. A small procedural change. A real one.
The amendments further seek to draw a sharper boundary between copyright protection for creative works such as paintings, drawings and digital art, and industrial design protection for products manufactured through industrial processes. Greater clarity would assist in identifying the appropriate form of protection, promote more consistent enforcement and reduce unnecessary overlap or disputes between the copyright and industrial design regimes.
Artificial Intelligence: The Hardest Questions in the Room
AI has taken most of the headlines, which is understandable and slightly misleading. It is one piece of a much wider agenda. Still, the two questions it raises are the hardest in copyright right now. May developers train generative models on copyrighted books, music, films and artworks without a licence? And if an AI system produces an original work, who owns it, if anyone?
These questions have produced divergent judicial approaches worldwide. In the United States, Thaler v Perlmutter confirmed that copyright requires human authorship, while Zarya of the Dawn recognised protection only for the human-created elements of AI-assisted works. Chinese decisions such as Li v Liu and the Ultraman litigation demonstrate a more nuanced examination of AI-generated outputs and the use of copyrighted training data.
Malaysia’s current legislation offers little guidance, making legislative clarity increasingly vital.
Our Perspective
The strength of these proposals is their breadth. MyIPO has resisted the temptation to write an “AI amendment” and call it reform. The creative economy is bigger than AI. It is artists, publishers, platforms, broadcasters and collecting societies and the proposals treat it that way.
The risk sits in the drafting. Broad ambitions produce vague statutes unless someone insists on precision, and a vague copyright statute stifles the very innovation it claims to protect. The law will also have to hold two things in tension: enforcement strong enough to mean something, and genuine room for education, research and public-interest use. Tip too far either way and the reform fails.
For copyright owners, though, the upside is concrete: injunctions that actually stick, a new revenue stream for artists, and clearer rules on AI and industrial design that make creative assets easier to value, license and enforce.
Looking Ahead
Copyright law is often perceived as a technical area of legislation. It is not. It is the legal infrastructure that underpins creativity, investment and cultural development. If implemented thoughtfully, these reforms could represent a seismic shift in Malaysia’s copyright landscape, positioning the country among the region’s more progressive copyright jurisdictions.
Ultimately, the real measure of success will not be how many provisions are amended, but whether the reforms enable creators, businesses and investors to innovate with confidence while ensuring that creative works continue to receive meaningful legal protection. That is the hallmark of a modern copyright regime.
Source: https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2026/07/10/better-copyright-protections-in-store
© KASS International. All rights reserved. This article is intended for practitioner information purposes and does not constitute legal advice.