Rebecca McKinnon has a blog post up today about debate surrounding proposed changes to online copyright law in Hong Kong. They amount to an emulation of America's Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), with a few crap-provements to make a Hong Kong version even more onerous:
Intellectual property law professor Peter Yu and Charles Mok, head of the Hong Kong Internet Society, spoke at a seminar here at Hong Kong University last Thursday. They pointed to a lot of ways in which the proposed legal changes would be potentially harmful to freedom of expression in Hong Kong.(…) Peter didn't say this outright, but a couple of questions arise in my mind, also unanswered by the consultation document: Might the existence of illegally obtained movies on the hard drive of a government critic be used as an excuse to put him in jail??? What about a journalist who does a hard-hitting, muckraking report? Might she get a call from somebody the night before it is published saying "Greetings. We have learned from your ISP that somebody using your home computer downloaded 100 songs illegally in the last month. (meaningful silence)…."
