Four Weddings and a Video - The Right to Privacy

A couple interested in getting married approach a videographer and admire images and videos of three weddings under his portfolio. They enter into a cosy relationship until one day they discover their own wedding has been included in his portfolio. Can they ask him to remove it? 

Copyright would usually belong to the author which in this case is the videographer. However there exists a right of privacy with regard to copyright works. This right  enables the commissioner of the videos or photographs (which in this case is the newly wedded but by now unhappy couple) the right to prevent the videographer from exhibiting the videos or photographs in public.

Is reposting an article illegal?

I am facing an interesting conundrum as I copy and paste No free lunch, an article about Singapore's nonchalant attitude towards downloading written by Grace Chng, on my blog. The article was published on asiaone.com, the online portal owned and managed by Singapore Press Holding (SPH), the media head honcho in Singapore. Did the post infringe copyright?

Let's go back to first principles. The article qualifies as a literary work (albeit in digital format) and is the property of SPH and will be protected by copyright. This gives SPH the right to prevent others from copying or reproducing the article. SPH could write to me and tell me to remove the work from the blog because it is a copy, republished without permission.

I could however fall back on what is known as the fair dealing exceptions which allows me to use the work for non-commercial purposes which includes research and study as well as teaching which is what I hope to achieve through this post.

No free lunch?

by Grace Chng, asiaone.com, April 25, 2009

TWO days after the movie Slumdog Millionaire swept awards at the Oscar's in February, one smart teenager - her mother told me - had downloaded the movie.

She did not think twice that it might be intellectual theft because the movie had been posted via a YouTube-like site, waiting to be downloaded.

The teenager's attitude probably reflects those of other people here: Last week's report in The Straits Times on Online Piracy: Many Feel No Social Stigma, said that almost every Singaporean knows that downloading movies and music is illegal but it will not stop them from doing so.

The survey, commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), found that while Singaporeans understood the need to respect intellectual property (IP), their actions left little to be desired.

In today's download-happy culture, getting things for free seems to be a given. That, and the bravado of being able to beat the system and get away with it, as well as the bragging rights to 'I saw it first' or 'I've played that game' long before a movie hits the screens or the game hits the shops, are the likely motivations of IP theft.

Worse, downloading sites like The Pirate Bay and RapidShare leave the doors wide open for people to load up on music and movies.

The Pirate Bay, for example, is the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, said the BBC last week. In February alone, 22 million simultaneous users registered with it.

To be sure, content owners are not sitting still. The site is being sued in Sweden by content owners there like Sony and Warner Brothers for IP theft.

The site's founders seem nonchalant about the suit, going by media reports. They consider themselves digital libertarians advancing the course of availing everything on the Internet for free.

Its founders were jailed by a Swedish court last week but the file-swapping site is still active.

Singapore's public education tack, to create greater awareness of the importance of IP rights protection, seems to be working. The IPOS survey results showed that awareness of IP theft was a little higher than two years' ago when the first survey was done. Authorities in other countries have wielded a tougher stick.

Last year in England, the British Phonographic Industry and telco cum media firm Virgin Media wrote to warn customers whose Internet link could have been used to download unlicensed content. In France, the government has threatened to cut off the Internet accounts of file-sharers.

But trying to completely outlaw piracy seemed like a losing battle, and music labels and movie houses decided to 'join' the rivals with legitimate online stores which allow customers to pick, choose and pay for what they want.

In Singapore, there is the more than 10-year-old Soundbuzz online music store. Vendors like Nokia and Sony Ericsson recently trotted out special handsets which are sold with bundled music from their respective online stores.

Admittedly, the content industry took too long to respond when file-sharing site Napster, which was started 10 years ago, began to chip away at its business model by letting people download content illegally. Mindsets about getting things for free over the Internet have been ingrained in peoples' minds.

Expect a long fight between the digital libertarians represented by the file-swappers and the content industry and authorities who say there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The twain shall ne'er meet.

chngkeg@sph.com.sg

Copyright : Ebooks containing pictures of known actors/stars

I wanted to write my own Ebook, and was wondering if it is breaching copyright protection if I copy and pasted pictures of well known actors/stars in an Ebook?

This area of law concerns copyright which is the right to prevent others from copying or reproducing an expression of an idea. In this case the expression of the idea is the two dimensional representation of the actors/stars in the form of a picture. in the case of the Ebook the image used will be in a digitised form of the original pictures and will be classified as reproductions of the copyrighted work which is entitled to the same level of protection as the original pictures.

The pictures would either be the property of the person who took it or the news agency who employed the person who took it or an image bank which has been paid for the pictures and which is allowed to resell them for a fee.

One way  to overcome these obstacles is to take the pictures yourself. Alternatively you may refer to the copyright owners as to which public license under the Creative Commons scheme is attached to the pictures. If the owners have opted for this scheme they may issue four varying levels of permission to parties interested to use the pictures. However it is unlikely the owners have opted for this scheme in this particular case due to the fact the actors/stars are well known and there is no benefit to the owners to allow their pictures to be used freely and for the fact that it is probably going to used for commercial purposes. The scheme is more applicable for reproductions of copyrighted works that are not well known and used for academic or information purposes.

In conclusion you would probably have to pay for the use of the pictures. You can of course go ahead and take the risk of using the pictures in the hope of being lost in the crowd. However there is a chance the Ebook will become well known enough to get the attention of the copyright owners and youcan be sued for copyright infringement. On the other hand if the actors/stars are no longer popular, such additional publicity would be more than welcome and the copyright owners may just keep quiet about it.

What is Pirate Bay guilty of?

The four men who run The Pirate Bay, a file sharing website, have been found guilty of promoting copyright infringement by a Stockholm court. What exactly is their crime? - Justin Santiago

Interestingly the site was was still up as of today 17th April 2009 . I was able to search for Australia, the movie directed by Baz Luhrman, but was unable to copy the bit torrent into Limewire, a peer to peer network and start the downloading process, as I usually would have done. Could this be a sign that the good times of old when we could download movies for free are now over?

It appears that Sweden is taking the tough stand on facilitation of copyright infringement which in the UK is not a crime but which prosecutors interpret to mean 'distributing' infringing copies or 'communicating' copies to the public in the course of a business to apprehend criminals.

Employee's Rights in Their Own Work

I'm an employee. Do I own the copyright to my own work? 

Sounds like a silly question. Of course you own it - you are the author, right? However there is one important statutory exception under the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 1996 where it is stated that if a literary, artistic, dramatic or musical work or a film is created by an employee in the course of his employment, then the employer will be the first owner of copyright in the work.

If you were an employee and wanted to claim the copyright to your work you would have to take note of the following based on Ultra Marketing (UK) LImited and Thomas Alexander Scott v Universal Components Ltd :-

1. You must make sure that you don't spend time on the work during the working day or at the company's premises
2. The work you have created must not be related to the business of your employer
3. The work that you have created must not have been created when you were under the company payroll
4. The work must not be of the type that forms an integral part of what I was employed to do

Thus if you were hired as an engineer to work on improving the quality control of LCD panels in an assembly line, you would be able to make a stronger claim to any work you have produced if it was  unconnected to LCD panels and if you worked on it during your free time outside work.

How much can I take and use?

While working as an engineer in a factory I learnt a certain technique. I improved on the technique and left the company and went out and set up an engineering company selling machinery that utilised that improvised technique. Can I do that? 

The area of law is called breach of confidence which has developed through common law and equity and deals with an obligation of confidence by parties in a certain relationship who have a responsibility not to disclose or use confidential information.

There are three important points that need to be discussed in order to ascertain whether the engineer has committed a breach of confidence.  Following Coco v Clark, it is important to determine whether information about the technique has the necessary quality of confidence which is determined by several factors.

Firstly to have the necessary quality of confidence the technique must not be in the public domain, it must be a trade secret. Information that has been released by the owner including a patent application is considered to be in the public domain. Also if the information allows the engineer to have an unfair advantage in the marketplace (the springboard doctrine - knowledge of the technique allowed the engineer to springboard when setting up his own business)  as a result of obtaining the information then this too would impart a quality of confidence to the information.

Secondly the quality of confidence will be determined by the relationship between the engineer and the factory. If it is one of an employer-employee relationship then a number of factors are considered whether the engineer owed a duty of confidence in respect of this information depending on the nature of the employment and the nature of the information.

The third point about unauthorised use of information occurs where confidence can occur as long as information is passed (in the course of business) and is then used to compete with the person owning the information as in Seager v Copydex.