The legislation in Malaysia is also complete and largely TRIPS compliant10. The
intellectual property administration in the country has improved considerably since
the IP Office has been incorporated as a body corporate and a statutory body in
2003.11 The new form of organisation gives the Malaysian Intellectual Property Office
(MyIPO) more freedom to regulate its own affairs with regards to its employees and
the use of its funds12, although the office remains under the directions and supervision
of the Minister of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs13. Problems remain in the
enforcement sector and with the judiciary. Statistics show that the Malaysian courts
are overloaded and backlogged14. As in other countries of the region, discussions are
underway to form a specialised intellectual property court to solve this problem. And
while serious efforts have been made to improve the enforcement of intellectual
property rights, Malaysia is still struggling with its reputation as the world’s most
significant producer/exporter of pirated optical disk entertainment software15.
Malaysia has strong ambitions in the fields of information technology and
biotechnology. The multimedia super corridor in Cyberjaya on the outskirts of Kuala
Lumpur, which provides favourable conditions and tax advantages for IT companies,
is well known. The legal framework for the further development of the IT sector
improved at the end of the 1990s with the enactment of the Digital Signature Act, the
Computer Crimes Act and the Telemedicine Act, all of 1997, the Communications
and Multimedia Act of 1998, and various amendments to the Copyright Act.16 The
latest mega project of the government is BioValley Malaysia, a similar project to
Cyberjaya in the field of biotechnology, which is supposed to become operative in
2006. This follows the establishment of a National Biotechnology Directorate
(BIOTEK) under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (MOSTE),
which in turn was followed by the establishment of Biotechnology Cooperative
Centers (BCC)