Guidelines on Dissemination of Information through Government Homepages Chapter XI

XI. Copyright Issues on the Internet

[Sections A and B below are extracts from the Intellectual Property Department’s Handbook – “Managing Intellectual Property in the Government”.]

(A) Guarding against Infringing the Copyright of Others

118. Works on the Internet can be protected by copyright. Normally, copyright works may not be copied without permission (even into computer memory). However, if a transient and incidental copy is made and such copying is technically required for the viewing of the work, it would not be an infringement. That means, browsing on the Internet is permitted in our copyright law.

119. Making available copies of a copyright work to the public without the consent of the copyright owner is not allowed. ‘Copies’ does not only mean ‘hard copies’: making copies available to the public also includes doing so through the Internet.

120. Therefore, departments that place any materials on web pages (including text, graphics, photographs or sounds) without the permission of the copyright owner are infringing copyright.

121. It could arguably be a copyright infringement to place a hypertext link to another website (i.e. someone else’s copyright work) without permission. In the circumstances, it is recommended that prior permission should be sought from the webmaster of another site before making a hypertext link to it.

122. Only use other people’s trademarks or logos with permission. Apart from a slight possibility that doing so would infringe the trademark right, there is also a significant chance of infringing copyright in the mark or the logo.

123. Do not limit your concern for intellectual property rights to Hong Kong law: the Internet does not recognise geographical boundaries. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government may be found liable for infringement under foreign law in any country in which your material is available through the Internet.

(B) Protecting Your Copyright on the Internet

124. Copyright can be protected in Hong Kong and virtually the whole of the rest of the world without need for registration, and placing a copyright notice is not obligatory. The latter may help, however, to make it clear that an owner does want to enforce his copyright. If you place a copyright notice, you should include the word ‘Copyright’, the name of the right-owner, the year and the place where the work was first made public. You may put in additional words to make the use of your copyright work conditional (e.g. “This page may be copied to facilitate public consultation purposes only, and may not be included as part of any other publication.” Or “This page may be copied or included in another publication, provided that the following notice is included: ‘Copied from the Hong Kong SAR Government WWW Page at …’.”) But make your notices simple and easy to understand.

125. On a practical level, providers of materials on the Internet should be aware that enforcement of Government’s rights outside Hong Kong will be difficult, if not impossible in many cases. Starting from this point, some bureaux/departments may consider it worthwhile (and gain some goodwill) to explicitly disclaim copyright and let people copy the work as they wish. In any case, assume that even if you wish to enforce, it will be hard to do so cost-effectively outside Hong Kong, so please don’t put Government’s commercially-valuable works on the homepages.

126. Never place material on the Internet which may form the potential basis for a patent for an invention or an application for registered design. Publishing details on the web will prejudice any chance of gaining a patent or registering the design.

(C) Copyright Issue in the Conversion of Traditional Chinese Character Version Content into Simplified Chinese Character Version

127. Bureaux/departments are reminded that even if they have the copyright owner’s permission to place materials on traditional Chinese character web pages, the permission obtained from the copyright owner does not necessarily cover the simplified Chinese character version of the materials converted by using conversion software. Bureaux/departments are reminded to obtain separate permission of the copyright owner for the adaptation or copy of the materials into simplified Chinese character version web pages.