I traveled down to KL over the weekend to attend eLawyer Law Conference 2009 (Blogging & Law). It is organized by my friend Eddie Law, who is passionate on building an online community of lawyers. Exabytes is the premium sponsor of the event and I represented WebmasterMalaysia Forum, one of the online media partner.The event was held at Auditorium Tun Mohd Suffian of UM Law Faculty.
The conference touched on a very important and serious issue that concern all bloggers in Malaysia – the legality of blogging, especially in the wake of many big name bloggers were detained over the past few years. No wonder the conference was packed with people: media, lawyers, law students, and of course, the bloggers.
Eddie kicked start the conference with a brief introduction of the conference, followed by the acknowledgment of the attendees and sponsors. He then gave us a tour on eLawyer, the biggest online legal portal in Malaysia.
And the main event began.
The two invited speakers are Mr. Foong Cheong Leong and Mr. Nizam Bashir. Both are lawyers and bloggers. Mr. Foong is a KL lawyer and blogs at XES.CX (cool domain name!); Mr. Nizam is a Malacca lawyer and blogs at Poetic Justice.
Mr. Foong spoke about blogging and intellectual property law in Malaysia. He told us that when you used others intellectual property, from photos, artwork, music or writings, it is best to seek permissions and credit the original author. Well, that make sense, I thought. But not these: if somebody else taken your photo and posted at his blog, you don’t have the right the request removal, because the person that takes the photo owns the right. Scary, isn’t it?
Mr. Nizam then spoke about blogging and defamation law. He went through several cases of defamation law over the past years, where RPK was mentioned several times. He then gave us one golden advice of blogging: “Blog with responsibility”.
Then, it was the Q & A sessions. I was astonished by the audiences’ enthusiasm and participation. A lot of questions were asked, and answered well.
Overall, the conference was a great success. I’m sure every bloggers who attended (including me) will look at blogging differently after this.
Great job, Eddie!
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