To sustain the development of Hong Kong's digital content and entertainment industry, it is crucial to strengthen protection against circumvention of technological measures for copyright protection. Effective legal protection and legal remedies to the TPMs will ameliorate our digital copyright law, which is a key driver for e-commerce adoption.

To this end, the administration proposes to extend existing civil rights of copyright owners against circumvention of TPMs-from copying infringement to cover access control measures, and the act of circumvention. Criminal liabilities are also proposed for the making, importation or export for sale or dealing in any circumvention devices and providing circumvention services of a commercial nature.

Disagreement within the ranks

But despite unanimous support for the purpose and intent of the new anti-circumvention provisions, copyright owners from the software game industry deeply disagreed with the administration on an exception in the new provisions.

According to the administration's proposal, criminal liability for dealing in such devices is exempted if a TPM has been employed to a physical copyright work and the TPM contains regional coding. In other words, dealing of circumvention devices solely designed for gaining access to parallel imported copyright works, e.g. video games or DVDs imported from other regions, is not under the scope of the new anti-circumvention provisions.