04/08/2026

TUESDAY | AUG 4, 2026

3 ‘Amend existing Act to address AI copyright concerns’

Ű BY T.C. KHOR newsdesk@thesundaily.com

GEORGE TOWN: Malaysia should amend the Copyright Act 1987 to clarify who owns and controls copyright over AI-generated works instead of attempting to address the issue under the proposed Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance Bill, a lawyer says. Esther Ong, senior partner at Messrs Esther Ong Tengku Saiful & Sree, said questions of authorship, originality, ownership and copyright exceptions are fundamentally copyright issues that belong under the Copyright Act, which already governs intellectual property (IP) rights and fulfils Malaysia’s obligations under international copyright treaties. “Embedding copyright rules in a technology-specific statute dates them the moment the technology moves,” she told theSun . Her comments come as the government prepares the AI Governance Bill. Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo confirmed on July 13 that the proposed law would regulate AI systems rather than AI-generated content, leaving copyright matters to existing laws. Ong said the Copyright Act is better suited because it is organised around creative works and legal rights rather than specific technologies, enabling it to remain relevant through successive technological shifts from photocopiers and the internet to Brandguard founder and CEO Visharad Venugopal Mannadiar said many businesses wrongly equate a licence to use AI-generated content with ownership of enforceable IP rights, exposing themselves to potential legal disputes. “The first question is whether copyright exists in the output at all. “Copyright law is built around identifiable authorship and original creative effort, so protection for a purely machine-generated result remains uncertain,“ he told theSun . His comments come as the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO) conducts a public consultation on proposed amendments to the Copyright Act 1987, including the treatment of AI-generated content and the use of copyrighted works to train AI systems. The consultation closes on Aug 14. Visharad said businesses should first determine whether copyright exists in the AI-generated output before considering ownership. He added that they must then establish who owns the human contribution, which may depend on whether the work was created by an employee, freelancer or agency, as well as the contractual arrangements between the parties. “The third question is whether the output is safe to use. “An AI platform may give the business contractual permission to use an output, but that does not necessarily mean the business owns enforceable copyright or that the output does not resemble somebody else’s work.

o Focus on creative works and legal rights makes current law more suitable: Lawyer

way of checking.” However, she emphasised that users remain responsible for AI-generated content they choose to publish, particularly if they deliberately prompt AI systems to reproduce specific works or imitate protected assets. She also urged organisations adopting AI to be mindful of broader legal and commercial risks, including uncertainty over copyright protection, infringement claims, inaccurate or fabricated content, authenticity and disclosure issues, and the difficulty of proving human creative contribution. She highlighted confidentiality breaches as a particular concern for law firms, saying many users overlook restrictions buried in AI platforms’ terms of service before uploading client documents or legally privileged material. “If the human contribution isn’t documented at creation, it can’t be reconstructed at enforcement and rights that might have existed become unprovable. “The practical advice is simple: keep the record of the human hand.”

“Even the one country that protected machine-made works on paper has just recommended deleting that protection.“ She added that as AI tools become increasingly sophisticated, AI-generated works also risk reproducing protected creative expression from existing works. She urged businesses and content creators to reduce those risks by using AI tools trained on licensed datasets when possible, negotiating contractual indemnities, avoiding prompts that reference living artists or protected works, conducting similarity checks before releasing commercially important assets, and retaining records of prompts, iterations and edits. Ong said primary responsibility for copyright infringement should rest with AI developers because they determine the datasets used to train their models. “They are better placed to negotiate a single licensing agreement covering all uses, rather than leaving millions of individual users to clear rights they have no

prompting lacks skill. It plainly involves skill. The problem is control over expression.“ She described prompting alone as “skill without control”, while prompting combined with selection, iteration and modification gives users greater control over the final expression, which is the element copyright law has traditionally protected. She added that countries are continuing to refine their legal approaches to AI-generated works. She also said the US Copyright Office has generally adopted a stricter position, while Chinese courts have recognised copyright when there is sufficient human creative control over the final expression. Ong said Malaysian law similarly focuses on the degree of human contribution in determining originality.

smartphones and generative AI. She added that the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO) should continue administering copyright matters, while the proposed Central AI Authority focuses on AI governance. She also said the Bill could complement the Copyright Act by requiring greater transparency from AI developers over the datasets used to train their models. Ong said one of the biggest unresolved questions surrounding AI-generated content is whether the level of human involvement is sufficient to qualify a work for copyright protection. She added that a prompt itself could qualify as an original literary work if it is sufficiently expressive but that does not automatically extend copyright protection to the AI-generated output. “The problem isn’t that He also said businesses adopting generative AI must understand the legal risks surrounding ownership, originality and copyright infringement instead of relying solely on the technology’s convenience. Visharad said companies should also avoid depending on copyright protection alone and instead adopt a layered IP strategy to safeguard AI assisted creations. He added that meaningful human involvement must remain central to the creative process, with the final work edited, refined, selected and shaped by a person rather than simply accepted from an AI system. He also urged businesses to clearly define ownership through contracts with employees, designers, agencies and freelancers, conduct clearance searches before launching AI-assisted content, and strengthen protection through trademark registration, industrial design protection, development records and, when appropriate, voluntary copyright notification. Visharad summed up the practical approach as“create, clear and control”. “Create with meaningful human involvement, clear the output for legal risks, and control it through contracts, registrations and records.“ He said the amount of time spent producing AI-generated content should not determine authorship, adding that what matters instead is whether the individual exercised meaningful creative control over the final expression. “A person could spend three weeks entering prompts without exercising meaningful control over the final expression. “Another person may spend less time but make substantial creative

Businesses cannot assume ownership of AI content: IP expert GEORGE TOWN: Paying for an artificial intelligence (AI) platform or writing the prompt does not automatically give businesses ownership of AI-generated content, an intellectual property (IP) expert has said. “Permission to use an AI output is not the same as ownership of enforceable IP.”

Visharad said he expects disputes involving AI-generated works to become more common, including cases involving synthetic voices, likenesses, imitation of distinctive creative styles and AI outputs that reproduce substantial parts of existing works. – SYED AZAHAR SYED OSMAN/THESUN decisions by developing the concept, controlling the composition, rewriting sections, combining

He also called for amendments to the Copyright Act 1987 to provide greater legal certainty over AI-assisted works while balancing innovation with the interests of human creators. Visharad said the law should distinguish between AI-assisted works and predominantly AI-generated works, while also clarifying how copyrighted material may be used to train AI systems. “Malaysia should be pro-AI without becoming pro-piracy. The aim should be to encourage innovation while ensuring that human creators remain part of the economic value chain.” – By T.C. Khor

involving AI-generated works to become more common, including cases involving synthetic voices, likenesses, imitation of distinctive creative styles and AI outputs that reproduce substantial parts of existing works. “The central question in many cases will be accountability. Who selected the tool, who supplied the material, who approved the output and who benefited commercially from it?” He advised businesses to adopt formal AI-use policies rather than merely keeping folders of screenshots of prompts.

elements, redrawing the output and deciding what the final work should look like.” He also said someone who merely accepts the first AI-generated result has a relatively weak claim to authorship, while a person who directs and substantially shapes the final work has a much stronger claim. “Treat AI as an assistant, not as the final decision-maker. The human must still be able to identify what they personally contributed.” Visharad said he expects disputes