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The Chief Executive of Singapore’s Intellectual Property Office aknowledged there are concerns that VPNs could infringe copyright
Singapore’s Ministry of Law today announced a public consultation to receive feedback on the country’s copyright regime — including whether or not “allowable circumventions of technological protection measures” should be sustained.
The review will include virtual private network (VPN) technology — a popular service for people throughout the city to watch foreign media content not accessible in Singapore.
The public consultation, which launched today and will end on October 24, 2016, is meant to help the government update the law and ‘keep pace with modern developments’.
“Technological developments in the past decade have led to immense changes in how copyrighted works are created, distributed, accessed and used,” the announcement read.
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The reason VPNs are falling under this public consultation is because of legal ambiguity surrounding circumvention technology.
Currently, the law outlaws knowingly circumventing, “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work”.
But, there are exemptions to the rule. They include:
- Educational institutions and libraries.
- Undertaking research on encrypted technologies.
- Identifying and disabling technology capable of disseminating personal information.
- If sole purpose of block is to prevent access to minors.
- Creating and sharing interoperability of an independently created computer program with another computer.
- Finding and fixing Security flaws.
- Law enforcement and national defense.
Nowhere in the law are VPNs mentioned, or the most common use for the technology — circumventing geo-blocks to stream movies, videos and other entertainment content.
Daren Tang, the Chief Executive of Singapore’s Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (Ipos), who are involved in the public consultation, told the Straits Times,
“There are some concerns that bypassing geo-blocks could infringe copyright.”
Tang did couch those statements by saying Singapore supported parallel import, which are facilitated by VPNs, according to the article.
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Indranee Rajah, Senior Minister for State and Law & Finance said in a statement,
“This is a wide ranging review which aims to help creators gain more recognition and practical protection for their works, while providing users with reasonable and easier access to those works”.
“This will help the Government take into account all stakeholders’ views so as to improve our copyright regime to better support the creative economy,” she added.
The other tech-related part of the public consultation was the Ministry of Law recommending legalising text and data mining for the purpose of business analytics.
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