In the case of Creative Technologies Ltd. v. Aztech Systems Pte Ltd, the Singapore Court of Appeal was confronted with the question of whether there was an act of copyright infringement in disassembling the firmware in a competitor's sound card in order to develop one that was compatible or inter-operable with applications programs that had been developed to operate with the plaintiff's sound card. At first instance it had been found that there was no infringement, mainly on the ground that since the disassembled sound card had been purchased legitimately, the right of disassemble was among the licensed rights implied by the sale. The Court of Appeal disagreed and, after considering a number of decisions in other countries, including what it referred to as "the influential 9th Circuit decision" of Sega v. Accolade, held that, although the provisions of the Singapore copyright law appeared to be derived from those of the United States statute, the actual relevant wording of the Singapore Copyright statute was different. Thus in the section dealing with fair dealing, although copying for "research or private study" was permitted, the statute specifically defined "research" as excluding "commercial research" and the relevant provisions on copying computer programs reads:

... it is not an infringement for the owner of a computer program to make ... another copy or an adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and is used in no other manner...

In the present case the copying or adaptation had fallen outside this definition and so constituted infringement.