After a few years of consultation and lawmaking preparation, the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2014, commonly known as “Internet Article 23”, was scheduled to be submitted to the Legislative Council for 2nd reading last Wednesday (9 December). Since many pro-establishment LegCo members, who were easily the majority, were absent, the meeting was aborted as it did not make the quorum of 35 members. The meeting will continue on 16 December, the next scheduled date.
Why have there been such disputes behind the “Internet Article 23”? Officials have been claiming that the existing Copyright Ordinance is outdated. Certain representatives of copyright holders in the music industry have also asserted that laws should be established to protect creative freedom and the interests of the industry, but none of these managed to alleviate public anxiety. Why?
Legal common sense informs us that the Amendment Bill would turn a civil procedure into a criminal one.We are not probing into the details yet, but this fact alone is enough to cause great concern.
The gist of the problem is that the government has repeatedly exploited many different ordinances to supress the freedom of speech, suing individuals with various different charges. For example, the charges of “unlawful assembly” and “breach of peace”, which are supposed to counter triad activities, were used to sue protesters. “Dishonest use of computer” was originally intended to prosecute commercial frauds involving computers, but has now also been used to sue people who express their political opinions on the internet. This is the real crux of the issue.
People who support the government argue again and again that the Ordinance would not be used for such purposes, but, as shown again and again in the past, the government would. Anxieties such as this has already been generated by such a cursory glance at the proposed Bill as it stands now, so people could more easily find themselves in the wrong side of the law if more attention had been paid to examine it.
In addition, the government's recent exploitation of the process of arrest and prosecution has revealed to us that they are not concerned with whether the individual would be convicted; instead, such arrests often entail bothering you with detainment of 48 hours (with multiple examples of over 60-70 hours of detainment), as well as refusal of bail after mentioning in court, resulting in remandment between a few weeks and a few months in length, penalising individuals with “imprisonment” before conviction. These cases have not been rare.
With persistent window-dressing by the government, the issue with Internet Article 23 has still raised such opposition, due to the government's recent records of abusing the law through exploitation of the process of arrest and prosecution. Lacking legitimacy and public concent via any democratic processes, this government would find it very difficult to gain trust from the citizens.
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