New Singapore copyright laws
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Singapore has re-jigged its copyright law to help people with sight problems — and academics in film and media studies.
But the changes, scheduled to be going to affect on January 1, mean ordinary home users will be theoretically stopped from cracking old computer programs and games.
Users will be, “prohibited from using a password generator to generate access codes to play pirated video games or using software like DeCSS to make unauthorised copies of DVD movies,” says the Straits Times, going on.
Anyone caught breaking the law will face fines of up to $20,000, says the story.
However, the “visually-disabled” will be, “allowed to crack electronic books where the read-aloud function is disabled, so they can access the book’s contents”.
Film and media lecturers will also be allowed to, “extract video clips from copy-protected movies for classroom use, where they were previously forced to use the original discs to stay within the law”.
Only libraries will be allowed to copy obsolete computer programs and video games for archival purposes, says the story.
Straits Times – Copyright law amended , December 18, 2008
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