Industrial Designs Act 1996
INDUSTRIAL DESIGNS ACT 1996
AKTA REKA BENTUK PERINDUSTRIAN 1996
Act 552 · consolidated to 1 Jan 2013 · 37 pp
What this does to artists
Protects the look of a mass-produced article: the shape of a chair, the cut and ornament of a garment, jewellery, packaging, a product's form. Registration is required, and novelty is destroyed by disclosure anywhere in the world before you file, so file before you show. There is no grace period for showing your own work; the only six-month exception is an official exhibition or a disclosure someone else made unlawfully.
Overlaps awkwardly with copyright. Section 7(6) of the Copyright Act, which used to do this work, has been deleted. Two provisions replace it: s.7(5) removes copyright in a design actually registered under industrial design law, and s.13B cuts copyright back to twenty-five years from the end of the year articles made to the work were first marketed, where the owner industrially exploited it. Designers routinely fall into this gap.
What to read first
Section numbers read out of the AGC text itself
Where this one bites
Exhibit and sell your work
Selling the object is not selling the copyright, and the commission clause decides who owned it in the first p…
ScenarioSell merch, prints or downloads online
The moment you take money online you are a seller, and there is a disclosure rule almost no artist store compl…
ScenarioSomeone used your work without asking
Before anything else, check that you own it. Most of these come apart on ownership rather than on the copying,…
Full arrangement of sections 50 sections · show / hide
Extracted from the AGC PDF on this page.
Read the law
Source of record · lom.agc.gov.my/act-detail.php?act=552&lang=BI
This page is published by ALIM (Art × Law Initiative Malaysia) as general legal information for Malaysia’s creative communities. It is not legal advice. It does not take your circumstances into account, and reading it does not create a solicitor-client relationship with ALIM or with anyone associated with it.
The law changes. Each Act reproduced here is the Attorney General’s Chambers’ consolidated reprint and carries the date it was consolidated to; amendments made after that date do not appear in the text, and the authoritative version of any Malaysian law is the one published in the Federal Gazette. Subsidiary legislation, state enactments and local authority by-laws may also apply to your situation and are largely outside this library.
Please do not act, or decide not to act, on the strength of this page alone. Take advice from an advocate and solicitor on your own facts. To the extent permitted by law, ALIM and its contributors accept no liability for any loss arising from reliance on this page.
If you have a live problem, talk to us. It is free and confidential.