On As of 1 April 2001, the captioned ordinance has taken effect and one of the aims of the amended laws is to combat corporate copyright piracy activities. In order to avoid any violation of the laws, all departments and their research centres must ensure that legal copies and sufficient licences for the software installed or to be installed on their Staff LAN servers, Student LAN or any other servers, individual PCs and/or workstations were or will be acquired, and that their licensing conditions are complied with or will be rectified. If the checking exercise is not done properly, the University may be liable to prosecution.

To help departments verify whether a particular piece of software is covered by a Central Licence, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has compiled several lists of Centrally Licensed PC Software accessible at the following URLs:

http://www.ncm2.xyz/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareCWIN95.htm
for Chinese Windows 95,
http://www.ncm2.xyz/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareWIN95.htm
for English Windows 95,
http://www.ncm2.xyz/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareCWIN98.htm
for Chinese Windows 98, and
http://www.ncm2.xyz/csc/install-guide/CentralSupportedSoftwareWIN98.htm
for English Windows 98

As most of the University staff are now on Windows 98, naturally DOS and Windows 95 platforms will be phased out this summer. If you still have application software running on these operating systems, it is strongly recommended that new or updated versions should be purchased without delay, because sooner or later they will be run on Windows 98.

Licence issues are also concerns for software that was provided by departments but is currently installed either on central host machines or on Student LAN servers/clients in the CSC Student Terminal Rooms. These cases will be dealt with individually.

In order to enforce legitimate use of software, from now on, all CSC Work Request Forms for software installation must be accompanied by a duly signed “Declaration of Legitimacy of Software for Installation” form.

For further details and reference on the copyright laws, please refer to “Copyright in Education in Hong Kong”, a bilingual booklet produced by the HKSAR’s Intellectual Property Department (IPD). To find the booklet on the Web, go to the IPD’s homepage (http://www.info.gov.hk/ipd/), select “Information and Study Aids”, and then “Publication”.

The Frequently Asked Questions for the captioned Ordinance can be found under “FAQ” on the Web site of IPD.

For the summaries of the Hong Kong’s Intellectual Property Legislation, Circulars, forms and publications issued by the IPD, please select “IP Laws and Forms” on the IPD’s homepage.

For how to better manage your software property, please refer to:
http://www.bsa.org/usa/freetools/business/gsmus.phtml

For a better understanding on the software licensing conditions, please refer to:
http://www.kenfil.com./software_store/software_licensing/understand_license.asp