Keystone Law Corp

In a newspaper article by Siew Kum Hong, “Criminal Downside of Copyright Laws”, he criticized the new provisions of the Copyright Act (section 136(3A)), which expanded the scope of criminal infringing activities. The author opined that using the criminal process to combat IP infringements for personal use, which involve no trade element, was not necessarily better for society as a whole. In response to this opinion, Jennifer Chen, the Deputy Director of Customer & Corporate Communications of IPOS, first makes clear that the intent of that section is to target those who willfully flout the law to a significant extent and cause prejudicial impact on the copyright owners, rather than those who rip songs from their own CDs, which is an example given by Mr Siew to attack the rationality of this section. IPOS also maintained that Singapore’s approach of criminalizing willful copyright infringement is similar to that in countries such as Hong Kong, Australia and the US and not inconsistent with the US-Singapore FTA. Finally IPOS stressed that Singapore’s robust IP regime has played an important role in helping to attract talent and investments in IP-intensive business and concludes that criminalization of willful copyright is not unnecessary.