Decipher courtroom jargons, stay on the right side of IT law.
Called to the Singapore and English Bars, Bryan Tan has practised in two of Singapore's largest law firms and an international law firm. Bryan led many industry firsts including the first mass e-mail defamation case in the world, Singapore's first publicised telecoms competition dispute, a pan-Asian co-branded travel portal, the first privately-funded cable landing project in Singapore and the world's first registrar-level domain name dispute. His areas of practice include IT, telecommunications, biotechnology and bioinformatics, Chinese intellectual property, entertainment law and corporate work. He is also an author of Halsbury's Laws of Malaysia: E-Commerce. He also co-wrote the Singapore chapter of 'Digital Evidence' with Prof. Daniel Seng and is writing Halsbury's Laws of Singapore: E-Commerce.
Microsoft has come up with a new way of handling software piracy. Using its Windows Genuine Advantage tool, when a non-authorized version of its Windows XP Pro operating system is detected, every hour of use throws up a black screen that can be reset to anything else in the usual ways, but every 60 minutes it will change back to the plain black background.
Amid the tainted melamine milk product scandal in China, fingers are pointing in all directions and soon the knives will come out. While there exists finger-pointing in order to salvage reputation, the legal position on liability is quite clear.
Web site owners around the world run into one common legal problem-–liability for third-party content. Should a person be liable for content posted on a site by another, solely because he operates that Web site?
A while back, the government was all for nurturing creativity in Singapore--so the news of the Creative Commons must have sounded a good step in that direction.The last week of July saw the announcement that Singapore will launch its localized version of the Creative Commons.
I attended a recent briefing on Singapore's spam laws. While it was interesting and the speakers tried to get into the nuances of Singapore spam's legislation, the open floor round revealed some of the common problems plaguing spam laws.
The news over the past few weeks in Singapore is that a few people have been charged in relation to two transactions where kidneys were offered for sale. So far, two sellers, one would-be buyer and two middlemen have faced various charges under the Human Organ Transplant Act ("HOTA").
On Saturday, news broke that Internet start-up RecordTV has sued Singapore's national broadcaster MediaCorp for revenue losses arising from MediaCorp's allegations that RecordTV's service, which allows users to download free-to-air programs and store them in an online database, infringes copyright laws.RecordTV fired the first salvo last September by suing MediaCorp.
I have just returned from speaking at an international forum called eNotarisation, eApostilles and Digital Evidence.The notarization of documents is a function dating back a few centuries which facilities the production of a copy of a document without producing the original.
I have just written an alert for our clients pointing out that a Singapore company has asked for license fees for the use of what they claim is their technology--a method of locating Web pages by utilizing visual images.According to Vuestar Technology's Web site, a license from the company is required for the clicking, scrolling or streaming over a visual image to connect with a Web site or Web page.
After the Edison Chen episode, Singapore just had to get in on some action. Videos and censorship have recently made their way to the legal headlines again.