Book Title: Across Intellectual Property: Essays in Honour of Sam Ricketson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abstract: When it was enacted in 1987, the Singapore Copyright Act was a very close copy of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). This chapter provides the historical background to why the policy-makers chose the Australian model instead of the more conventional approach – at that time, at least – of looking to the UK. It then focuses on one particular occasion when Australian case law and scholarship played an important role in steering the copyright law in Singapore back onto the right path. The issue on that occasion was the following: can the author of a ‘work’ be a juristic person such as a corporate entity, or is authorship restricted to human creation?