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A District Court judge hearing an intellectual property infringement case has lashed out at the lack of a centralised system for checking who owns the copyright for recorded material.Judge Chua Fi-lan was hearing the case of three men charged with seven offences related to the seizure of about 1 million pirated VCDs and machinery for their production early last year.Tsui Chun-kit, 67, Cheung Chi-yi, 34, and Kwok Man-yuen, 43, and two companies they were associated with, Henry Technology Development and Topwide Technologies, have pleaded not guilty to two counts of possessing pirated material, two counts of producing infringing products and three counts of possessing machinery for its production."It is well established that it is very, very difficult to find out who the [copyright] owner is," Judge Chua said. "I have said before that there should be a register of every film and every piece of music made and who is the owner."She said even the customs service had difficulty tracing who the actual owners of some of the 200 or so works involved in the case were.The law required that if someone was found with items that infringed copyright, a court needed to be satisfied they knew it to be so, or had made an appropriate effort to satisfy themselves of its authenticity, before passing judgment.
Chan Nai-Ming, 38, was arrested in January by the Hong Kong Customs Services and will be sentenced Nov. 7. He faces up to four years in jail and a fine of up to about US$6,400. Chan had pleaded not guilty to copyright infringement for sharing movies "Miss Congeniality," "Daredevil" and "Red Planet," but was convicted after a four-day trial. It is an action one expert said is unlikely to be repeated in the United States. "There are laws on the books right now in the United States that would also send a person to jail for trading a single MP3 song on P2P file-sharing," Robin Gross, executive director, IP Justice, told TechNewsWorld. "What may be different is the will of the U.S. public in allowing a person to be sent to prison for sharing music. A U.S. jury would likely not imprison someone for sharing music online, even though the law of the books does permit it."Gross questioned the wisdom of using law enforcement to stop file-sharing. "One fundamental issues in this case is the idea of the punishment should fit the crime," she said. "Can anyone seriously argue that putting consumers in prison for swapping songs on the Internet is the best solution? Many violent offenses receive less punishment these days. So there should be a re-calibration so the punishment fits the crime. P2P file-sharing is ultimately a business-model problem -- not a legal problem."
Two weeks ago, Hong Kong resident Chan Nai-ming gained the distinction of being the first individual convicted for seeding three movies onto the Internet via BitTorrent. It was also the first time criminal charges, as opposed to civil charges, were brought up against an individual. Although this conviction may appear intimidating for casual BitTorrent users, Chan "Big Crook" Nai-ming, was a bit more than your typical user. Mr. Nai-ming was a provider. The Magistrate overseeing the case, Colin Mackintosh, explains."The defendant loaded the files into his computer, he created the .torrent files, created the images of the inlay cards and imprinted them with his logo, the statuette; he published the existence of the .torrent files, and the names of the films in question, on the newsgroup. He said in effect, ‘come here to get this film if you want it’."While October 24, 2005 was the day of conviction, on November 7, 2005, the sentencing was finally handed down. In addition to being the first criminal file-sharing case, Mr. Nai-ming has the further distinction of being the first individual sentenced to jail under such circumstances. Although some DirectConnect hub operators have received jail sentences in the United States, all were suspended. Unfortunately for Mr. Nai-ming's circumstance, he will indeed have to serve three months in a Hong Kong jail. Not anyone's idea of a good time.
Using a series of frame-by-frame computer screenshots at Monday's hearing, Liao showed presiding judge Poon Shiu-chor how easy it was for IFPI investigators to download six songs in MP3 format in about half an hour using WinMX, a popular online peer-to-peer file-sharing network that has since shut down. Because of the way WinMX was programmed, Liao added, the IP addresses of the file-sharers - which could be used to target the uploaders' true identities - were obscured
The government has recruited 200,000 members of youth groups to spy on internet activity and report illegal file transfers as part of an anti-internet piracy campaign launched yesterday.Senior Superintendent Tam Yiu-Kueng, of Customs' Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau, said the involvement of youth groups provided his department with extra monitoring capabilities."Initially we used 700 cadets from the Civil Aid Service for a three-month period," he said. "In that time we received over 800 reports of people illegally uploading... We were then able to inform the copyright holder and subsequently ask the website to remove the illegal content. If only 700 youths brought us such good results in three months, I think we will be very successful when the full 200,000 start helping us on July 19."
Starting this summer the Hong Kong government plans to have 200,000 youths search Internet discussion sites for illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies, and report them to the authorities. The campaign has delighted the entertainment industry, but prompted misgivings among some civil liberties advocates. The so-called Youth Ambassadors campaign will start on Wednesday with 1,600 youths pledging their participation at a stadium in front of leading Hong Kong film and singing stars and several Hong Kong government ministers. The Youth Ambassadors represent a new reliance on minors to keep order on the Internet. All members of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and nine other uniformed youth groups here, ranging in age from 9 to 25, will be expected to participate, government officials said. Tam Yiu-keung, the Hong Kong Excise and Customs Department’s senior superintendent of customs for intellectual property investigations, said the program should not raise any concerns about privacy or the role of children in law enforcement. The youths will be visiting Internet discussion sites that are open to all, so the government program is no different than asking young people to tell the police if they see a crime while walking down the street, he said. Local news reports are unfair in suggesting that the government is recruiting young people to spy on others, Mr. Tam added. “We are not trying to manipulate youths and get them into the spy profession. What we are just trying to do is arouse a civic conscience to report crimes to the authorities.” Unlike mainland China, which conducts periodic crackdowns on illegally copied movies at the insistence of Western countries, Hong Kong has a fairly good reputation for banning everything from counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags to pirated DVD’s. But the program is making some here nervous. Emily Lau, a pro-democracy lawmaker, said that the government should release more details of the program to the public for debate before proceeding, and should be particularly wary of having children report offenders to law enforcement. “Public education I support, but to get young kids to do the reporting?” she said. “I feel uneasy about it.” Christine Loh, the chief executive of Civic Exchange, a policy research group, said the government program would have to be managed with particular care because of its faint echoes of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, when children were encouraged to inform on their parents and other relatives.
