The ASEAN Intellectual Property Law Database Project

The member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been and continues to be an area of regional growth and innovation. Moves toward regional economic integration through ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and related initiatives brings the focus to economic reform, deregulation, liberalization, and modernization in key sectors.

With these changes and reforms comes complexity in understanding future trends, electronic commerce, establishing relationships with new government and private sector organizations, and developing strategies to ensure effective and fruitful collaboration. Now more than ever, the understanding of legal regimes that govern the ASEAN nations is necessary to conduct international efforts of any entity.

Yet there are various obstacles that impede the understanding and knowledge of the different laws that reside in each country. Those engaged in activities within the various Asean nations do not have the efficient resources to research current laws of countries. Though there are great developments in legislation occurring, knowledge of existing and new laws are not easily accessible. Even where legislative statutes are made available, they remain obscured by excessive text and cumbersome searches. Procuring the law on a particular subject matter for the different member states is extremely complex because not only may laws vary, but also the text of the law may not be readily accessible. In addition, those familiar seeking information under an academic agenda do not share the same pursuit of those with civic-oriented goals. There is no resource for enabling access to ASEAN laws through the use of an intelligent database.

This is the foundation for the IP Database Project, which is designing an innovative system to collect legal information on multifarious intellectual property regimes as an approach to access and problem solving across nations.

CAPTEL and the IP Academy are currently engaged in a collaborative effort to create, design and maintain an electronic database on the Internet for the purpose of providing access to the complete legislative texts of intellectual property laws in the ten member states of ASEAN. These member states include: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Not only will this website be a rich source of the Southeast Asian collection of laws, but the intention is to integrate trans-country search facilities and sidebars facilitating references to annotations, commentaries, directives and other official notes, etc. These tools will allow for an interactive centre where academics and professional can contribute, obtain and exchange material for research and study.

The IP Database Project is in essence:

1.  Open-source, web-based knowledge management software that enables intelligent and comparative searches of the ASEAN laws, recommending searches based on the past history of searches made.

2.  Offers an effective interface for registered users to annotate data.

3.  Provides a mechanism for centralizing access to ASEAN laws so that researchers, academia and the public across the different domains so can gain knowledge and understanding of laws.

4.  Both a tool for legal resource and information exchange worldwide.

Timeline for the remainder of the product life cycle:

July/August 2004 - Test versions of the collection with some laws to be ready

December 2004 - A working version of the collection and website and some laws to be ready and available on the Internet.

June 2005 - Substantially the whole of the main IP laws of the countries from whom copyright clearance has been obtained, and which are available in official English versions, should be available on the website. The pages already online may initially be simple electronic versions.

Current Status of the Project:
Since its inception, the project has completed some critical milestones, which include the following 

1. Development of the supporting database structure

2. Development of an appropriate web interface 

3. Collection and Collation of intellectual property laws of the ASEAN countries

The IP Database Project Team: Associate Professors Steven Ang, Harry Tan and Anil Samtani from Nanyang Technological University. 

The project's primary partner and funding is from IPA. See the signing ceremony of the MOU for the ASEAN IPA Dataproject here

Click here to read about the Project's Future Phases