Saturday, August 25, 2007

Odex fails action against PacNet for disclosure of identity of downloaders

In what appears to be a straightforward case of licensors of Animeware - ODEX - for illegal downloading of pirated copies by thousands, Odex filed suits against all the local commercial ISPs to obtain the identities of those who downloaded the pirated Anime. Odex was able to obtain orders against Singnet and Starhub but not against Pacific Internet.
According to the Straits Times report, District Judge Ernest Lau gave a 14 page judgment explaining his grounds for his refusal to allow for the application by Odex against PacNet. Odex has in his view failed to prove its case against PacNet to the required level to prove that the ISP must be compelled to divulge the identities of the alleged wrongdoers. Judge Law likened their demand for the identities from the ISPs as an Anton Piller order. As AP orders are viewed as draconian and damaging, such ofrders should only be granted if the Plaintiff is able to prove that it has an extremely strong prima facie case. This high standard should be applied in the case of Odex case as to protect the public interest element. ISPs owe a duty to its subscribers to keep their identities confidential.
As for the Odex case itself, it was not able to prove that it was the copyright owner as it did not have the exclusive license from the copyright owners as required by the Singapore Copyright Act. As it was neither the copyright owner nor exclusive licensee, it did not have the locus standi to bring the action.
Further, the Judge also mentions that he was not satisfied with how Odex was able to arrive at it identified the alleged downloaders. As such, Odex did not fulfil its standard of proof to obtain the order.
The impact of this decision will be felt in more than IP suits against downloaders and ISPs. Other suits such as defamation, fraud or even commercial transactions will have to prove to a high standard to obtain the identities of account holders before they can commence the substantive action itself.
For more information as reported by Straits Times, CLICK HERE.

Monday, August 20, 2007

How would the Singapore regulatory framework treat Eros LLC?

Day 1 of State of Play Conference.

Interestingly the latest case reported of the synthetic worlds is the case of EROS LLC suing Volkov Catteneo” who broke the sex program’s copy protection and sold unauthorized copies. So naturally Alderman (owner of ErosLLC) filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court (real court not Second Life court) in Tampa, Fla., last month for the alleged copyright breach.

For me, the interesting question is not about copyrightability of the software but whether national regulatory controls over pornography would treat the Eros programme itself as prohibited material. In the Singapore Films Act, Films includes videos games. Question is - whether this is a game?

Please be aware that the YouTube video may offend as it has images of nude avatars.

State of Play Conference BEGINS

Finally the long awaited conference has begun. Last night at the opening dinner for participants, meeting all the thought leaders, academics and businesses involved in the building and use of synthetic environments is exciting. There was a great presentation by IDA on the INSIGHT 2015 and how Singapore is going to adapt and capitalise the interactive digital technologies. Also there was a great prelaunch viewing of the movie "IdealWorld" that is a documentary of Second Life activities and entities there.

Check out their site here and have a look at it as a primer for the legal regulatory issues that is beginning to become the centre of focus for tech lawyers and professors.

IDEALWORLD MOVIE.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Is the next generation of portable computing already here?

It has been some time since new hardware or software developments excited me to an extent where I can forsee a sea change in the way we do computing. Some time back OLED technologies promised the coming of cheap and maleable screens. A couple of weeks ago I read about 60GB solid state memory now being produced making hard disk drives for portable computers almost a silly option. Much like the robustness of memory cards, these new huge solid state memory storage would promise to make portable computers even more portable in both weight and power usage.

The most interesting software development I just discovered this week was the company called PortableApps.com. This company champions portable computing in a manner that would cause an uproar with the portable computer manufacturers if it caught on. In short, the PortableApps software run applications from the ubiquitous Thumbdrive.

It even provides for free download its PortApps Suite that has an antivirus, web browser, instant messaging, Openoffice suite, Soduku puzzle game, and email client and it all runs comfortably on a 512MB thumb drive.

Just for a moment consider if we put all these technologies together - how would it look like to you? Well, it looks to me that the future computing looks interesting again - if only the mega manufacturers knew how to keep their costs low.
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