Date of Commencement: 2 October 2019 An Act to prevent the electronic communication in Singapore of false statements of fact, to suppress support for and counteract the effects of such communication, to safeguard against the use of online accounts for such communication and for information manipulation, to enable measures to be taken to enhance transparency of online political advertisements, and for related matters. Be it enacted by the President with the advice and consent of the Parliament of Singapore, as follows: PART 1 PRELIMINARY Short title and commencement 1. This Act is the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 and comes into operation on a date that the Minister appoints by notification in the Gazette. General interpretation 2.—(1) In this Act, unless the context otherwise requires —...
Section 26 in Part IV of the Electronic Transactions Act, which was modeled after Art 1 s 5 of the German Federal Law to Regulate Conditions for Information and Communication Services 1997, provides that a “network service provider” shall not be subject to any civil or criminal liability in respect of “third-party material” in the form of electronic records to which it “merely” “provides access." This exemption of liability is extended to cover liabilities in respect of data protection obligations with respect to third party material under the Personal Data Protection Act 2012. However this exemption does not extend to cover any obligations founded on contract, under a licensing or regulatory regime, laws or court orders to remove, block or deny access to material and copyright infringement. Of the key terms in this...
(1) The appellant/plaintiff, RecordTV, was the provider of a remote-store digital video recorder service, known as iDVR or Internet digital video recorder, which allowed its registered users to request the recording of the respondents/defendants' free-to-air broadcasts in Singapore, based on the scheduling information of the respondents' programming which the appellant has provided. The respondents' broadcasts were received by the appellant's roof-mounted antenna and routed to the appellant's recording computers. If a registered user requested a recording, the appellant's control software would instruct the system to record the said program. Once a recording was made and stored on the appellant's premises' computers, it was made available for viewing to the user who requested the recording on their computers or their...
In 1999, Singapore made its first amendments to the Copyright Act to introduce various safe harbor defenses for Internet intermediaries as network service providers. Arising from its obligations under the U.S. Singapore Free Trade Agreement, Singapore further revised in 2004 the safe harbor defenses in the Copyright Act for network service providers. (1) Section 193A of the Copyright Act states that the safe harbor defenses are to apply to “network service providers”, which includes ISPs as intermediaries providing services and connections for data transmission or routing, as well as intermediaries who provide or operate facilities for online services or network access. It would seem that “network service providers” are broadly defined so that most Internet intermediaries would qualify for the safe harbor defenses. In...
(1) Odex was a private company that provided Japanese anime programs to local television stations for broadcasting. It also distributed authorized copies of these programs to retailers for sale to the public. Odex alleged that with Internet piracy and the ease of obtaining DVD-quality movie files for free via P2P software, its sales of anime video titles had begun to drop significantly and that TV stations also bought fewer anime titles as they were allegedly losing viewership to illegal downloaders. (2) To address this problem, Odex engaged the services of BayTSP.com Incorporated (BayTSP), an American company, to collect and track instances of unauthorized uploading and downloading of copies of Japanese anime video titles. Through BayTSP, Odex discovered that there had been more than 474,000 unique downloads over an...
The Singapore Ministry of Law is proposing legislative amendments to allow right holders to apply directly to the courts for injunctions against Internet Service Providers to prevent users from accessing the so-called “pirate sites” without having to first establish ISPs’ liability for copyright infringement. The so-called “pirated sites”, known in the proposal as “egregious online locations”, are to be assessed by the courts based on certain non-exhaustive factors, including (1) whether the online location’s primary purpose is to commit or facilitate copyright infringement, (2) whether it makes available or contains directories, indexes or categories of the “means to commit copyright infringement”, (3) whether the owner of the location “demonstrates a disregard for copyright”, (4) whether the location has been...