Frequently Asked Questions

As a publisher (and as a blogger you are a publisher), you may be faced with situations of legal claims on information that you publish on your blog. Such claims include (a) defamation; (b) infringement of copyrights or other intellectual property rights; (c) breach of trade secrets; (d) distribution of pornographic materials; and a whole host of other possibilities.

(a) If you're concerned that you may have published a statement on your blog that could be false or cause harm to someone's reputation (or someone is claiming you have), you could have defamed that person.

(b) If you link to or make use of information, brand names, logos and/or images from other websites, articles or even blogs without proper permission, you could have infringed that person's copyright or other intellectual property rights.

(c) Publishing confidential corporate information, like customers' lists, financial information or any other information that the corporation deems confidential, may result in your breach of trade secret laws.

(d) Placing pornographic materials on your blog (even if the servers are outside Singapore) can expose you to prosecution under Singapore laws (and there are several acts) on such materials.

You should contact a lawyer familiar with Internet issues. The Internet has created special issues when 'traditional' laws are applied to it.

No. This legal guide is based on the laws of Singapore and laws do vary from country to country. However some of the principles are applicable across many jurisdictions. You should check out a similar guide for your own jurisdiction.

Yes. You will be as liable as if you have witten the material yourself.

Don't know. In the United States, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the First Amendment right to speak anonymously. No similar concept exist under Singapore law. However, there is no law that requires a blogger to use his/her real name when blogging. Taking this a step further, there is also no law in Singapore that prohibits a blogger from using anonimity technologies or techniques when blogging.

Not quite. If you try to blog anonymously through a third-party service, that service provider may be compelled by court order or police powers to disclose information that may lead to determining your identity.

Unlikely. The relationship between you, the blogger, and the blog service provider is governed by contract. Often in such contracts, the service provider can remove any material at its discretion.

Generally, defamation is a published statement that is false and that is harmful to someone's reputation. Libel is a written defamation. Slander is a spoken defamation. The laws of defamation in the United States is very different from that in Singapore. Thus, American websites concerning defamation should be read with caution.

Under the Singapore Defamation Act, an apology will only go towards reducing damages that a person can claim. However if the defamatory statement was made innocently, then an offer to make amends will be a defence to any defamatory action.

To make a defamation claim, that person defamed need not be mentioned by name, so long as he/she is reasonably identifiable. So if you defame 'that government officer with a house at 123, ABC Street', he can still be reasonably identifiable as the person defamed.

In the Singapore Defamation Act, 'newspaper' is defined as 'any paper containing public news or observations thereon or consisting wholly or mainly of advertisements which is printed for sale and is published in Singapore either periodically or in parts or numbers at intervals not exceeding 36 days'. Since a blog may not be a 'paper printed for sale', the protection to newspapers called 'qualified privilege' may not apply to blogs. Understand that this has not been tested in the courts.

Yes. On 10 December 2002, the High Court of Australia handed down a judgment in the Internet defamation dispute case of Gutnick v Dow Jones. The High Court's ruling effectively allows defamation plaintiffs in Australia to sue for defamation on the internet against any defendant irrespective of their location. The court stated: "If people wish to do business in, or indeed travel to, or live in, or utilize the infrastructure of different countries, they can hardly expect to be absolved from compliance with the laws of those countries. The fact that publication might occur everywhere does not mean that it occurs nowhere". Singapore courts are likely to follow that decision.

Short quotations for the purpose of review or criticism can amount to 'fair dealing' under the Singapore Copyright Act. Acknowledgement of the source of the quote is necessary. However many websites (blogs including) may grant you more generous rights. Thus you should check the terms and conditions of use as well. It is important to realise that the American concept of 'fair use' is different from 'fair dealing' under Singapore law.

Yes. You are free to report the facts and ideas embodied in another person's article or web page. Copyright only protects the expression - the combination of words and structure that expresses the factual information - not the facts themselves.

Creative Commons licenses provide a standard way for authors to declare their works "some rights reserved" (instead of "all rights"). If the source you're quoting has a Creative Commons license or public domain dedication, you may have extra rights to use the content. The attribution license for example, lets you copy, distribute, and display a work so long as you name the original author. Share-alike lets you make derivative works so long as you use the same license for your re-mix. A work in the public domain is no longer under copyright, so you can use as much as you want in any way you like.

Yes. The Creative Commons licenses provide several copy and share licenses complete with legal code, computer code, and a human-readable declaration and graphic to let others know that they're invited to copy and share. You can choose whether to require attribution, permit commercial use, or allow modifications. If someone wants to do more than is permitted by fair use or the terms of your license, they can still contact you for permission. See Creative Common's website for more information.

When a person enters comments on a blog for the purpose of public display, he is probably giving an implied license at least for that display and the incidental copying that goes along with it. If you want to make things clearer, you can add a Creative Commons license to your blog's comment post page and a statement that by posting comments, writers agree to license them under it.

Most people are happy to have other websites link to them. Indeed, "permalinks" for each blog post, to which others can link directly, are one of the features that have helped blogs and blog conversations take off. But some website owners complain that deep links - links that lead readers to an internal page on a website - "steal" traffic to the homepage or disrupt the intended flow of their websites. So it is best to look at the website's terms and conditions of use.

Images are subject to the same copyright laws as written materials. So in general you cannot use these images without that person's permission.

Under the Singapore Copyright Act, Network Service Providers (NSP) enjoy certain immunity from liability for infringement of copyright if the NSP has no knowledge that the material is infringing. Therefore, if the copyright owner gives a notice (contained the prescribed information) to the NSP requiring the NSP to take reasonable steps to remove the infringing material, most NSPs will do so. Such a notice is commonly called a 'take-down notice'.

Upon the removal or disabling access to the electronic copy of the copyright content, the NSP must notify the website owner who had put up the material. If the website owner disputes the notice, he may, within a prescribed period, submit a counter notice to require the NSP to restore (put back) the material on his website.

While you cannot sue the NSP if they comply with the provisions in the Copyright Act, you can sue the party issuing a false take-down notice for damages suffered by you. In addition, if convicted, he can be fined up to $10,000 or be sentenced to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years.