Tech Legal

By Bryan Tan

Decipher courtroom jargons, stay on the right side of IT law

The day tech saved me

Friday, June 26 2009 02:58 PM

A few months ago, I accepted an invitation from my car manufacturer to attend a driver orientation program. During that course, we were shown some fancy features of the bar. Other than ABS and air bags, which are pretty standard, the car had some kind of crash-warning technology. This feature triggers with a sudden lifting off the accelerator and causes the car to prepare for a crash by locking the doors, closing the windows and activating the brakes, amongst others. It did not seem like very important information at that time.

On Friday, I was at a traffic junction and followed..... Read more ť

Tags: H1N1 Flu, Manufacturer, Car, SARS, accident

What landlords can learn from techies

Sunday, June 14 2009 06:38 PM

Now and then, I get this urge to make the world a better place. Then there are these quirky ideas that come along.

There is legend that says Bill Gates once commented on what the car industry could learn from the software industry. Well, seeing how the car industry has turned out, perhaps those words could have been heeded. But in any case, I think another industry can learn from the software industry.

The turmoil that the world is in has hit home in some ways--there are a number of new small businesses established in mid-2008 that have suffered. Conceived at..... Read more ť

Tags: Inflation, Car, tenant, Bill Gates, Catch-22

Software makers to be held more accountable?

Monday, June 01 2009 10:40 AM

Software companies throughout the world are taking note of moves in Europe to subject software to the same consumer protection standards as other goods, such as cars and home appliances. My firm has just written a written alert on it.

Some of the proposals include making manufacturers legally liable for software code and enforcing the provision of a two-year working guarantee. The proposal does sound attractive--after all, since my toaster is increasingly going to have software in it, shouldn't software be judged on performance like a toaster? My toaster looks the same as when my mom bought hers a quarter..... Read more ť

Tags: consumer protection, Car, business software, freeware, shareware

How confidential is confidential?

Monday, May 25 2009 10:06 AM

Although this post is about the Aware's instructor guide, I would like to state from the outset that I am not going to comment about the Old Guard, the New Guard, the Old New Guard, homosexuality or religion (if you are not aware of these terms, then you do not need to know them for the purpose of this blog).

What you need to know is that the new president of the Aware (Association of Women for Action and Research) claimed that its instructor guide, which was used for the teaching of its comprehensive sexuality education in Singapore's public school, and..... Read more ť

Tags: Netcom, Scientology, Aware, DMCA, RTC

What in the world is Internet self-regulation?

Monday, May 04 2009 07:25 PM

A few months ago, Singapore Minister Lui Tuck Yew commented that the Internet community in Singapore missed the chance to show that it could shoulder a higher degree of self-regulation by not rebutting many of the online attacks on Member of Parliament Seng Han Thong who was physically attacked.

To be fair, everyone has been throwing about the term "self-regulation" long enough but we are not quite sure what kind of creature this is. This got me thinking: What does this self-regulation look like? Is this a panel of some kind or are there appointed moderators? Who becomes "god"?

Is this "regulator"..... Read more ť

Tags: Internet, Singapore, Content-Disposition

Scholars living in glasshouses

Monday, April 13 2009 10:38 AM

This is not about Alice in Wonderland but about a Singapore government scholar by the name of Eng Kai Er. It seems Eng, who graduated from Cambridge University, is a 2007 A*Star National Science Scholarship (NSS) recipient doing her Ph.D. in Infection Biology at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. She was charged in court for walking around nude in Holland Village, a popular watering hole in Singapore.

For the benefit of non-Singaporeans, government scholars are the cream of the crop--the best and the brightest--upon whom expensive scholarships and an accelerated career track are showered upon. I guess the best is expected from such..... Read more ť

Tags: Scholar, Web Site, storage, digital copying, University of Cambridge

Pushing the limits of harassment

Monday, March 16 2009 04:02 PM

In Talking Cock the Movie, a parody portrayed a young man who had joined his father's loan-shark business and hatched the idea of using e-mail messages to make demands for repayment. Such notices would otherwise have required the pasting of notices on one's door. Some past practices have progressed in recent years.

A recent report tells of a Singapore architect who was harassed by an unknown caller who made hundreds of phone calls to his home and his mobile phone in a matter of days. The police are investigating this matter while the High Court also granted an application to..... Read more ť

Tags: Harassment, Movie, South Korea, China, Singapore

Flipping through Facebook's privacy flap

Thursday, February 26 2009 09:56 AM

The furore over Facebook's change (and reverting) of its user terms illustrates a few points about Internet companies.

(a) In order to be nimble, they will reserve the right to change their terms as easily as possible. There is no way an Internet company can wait for everyone to agree to every change.

(b) Their lawyers will draft terms of use as wide as possible in order to cater for as wide an audience as possible, and for as many scenarios as possible.

(c) Consumer-driven businesses will, at the end of the day, listen to consumer feedback (i.e. customers win, lawyers lose).

From a..... Read more ť

Tags: Intellectual Property, Car, Internet, user data, Internet company

Market competition and Chinese New Year

Monday, February 23 2009 11:17 AM

I wanted to write this only after the Chinese New Year season had passed. As far back as I can remember, during the run-up to the Chinese New Year, many businesses in Singapore would raise their prices. It would be common for barbers to charge a few dollars more while shops selling Chinese New Years goodies such as barbequed pork slices, would increase their prices every few days, peaking on the eve of Chinese New Year. This year, even food outlets started charging a premium during the Chinese New Year.

In the past, this practice came about because certain acts..... Read more ť

Tags: Business, Price Increase, Agreement, Singapore, food

High tech undone by low tech failings

Friday, January 02 2009 01:42 AM

The recent Mumbai terrorist attacks have left the entire world stunned. Terrorists are now improving their skills so that they are able to beat the known skills of the law enforcement agencies all over the world. They are regularly using the Internet to obtain operational intelligence information like using Google Earth and Google Maps for geographical and location-spotting and planning. They are using difficult-to-trace Skype and voice over IP servers to communicate. They have also started eying BlackBerries so that e-mail and chats on-the-move are possible.

During the Bali bombing investigations, it was found that terrorists exploited prepaid SIM cards to..... Read more ť

Tags: SIM Card, Security, sales, Madrid, Mumbai

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About the blogger

Bryan Tan

Called to the Singapore and English Bars, Bryan Tan has practised in two of Singapores largest law firms and an international law firm. Bryan led many industry firsts including the first mass e-mail defamation case in the world, Singapores first publicised telecoms competition dispute, a pan-Asian co-branded travel portal, the first privately-funded cable landing project in Singapore and the world's first registrar-level domain name dispute. His areas of practice include information technology, telecommunications, biotechnology and bioinformatics, Chinese intellectual property, entertainment law and corporate work. He is also an author of Halsbury's Laws of Malaysia: E-Commerce. He also co-wrote the Singapore chapter of 'Digital Evidence' with Prof. Daniel Seng and is writing Halsbury's Laws of Singapore: E-Commerce.