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Continue reading “Contrasting Web Scraping Cases in SG and US “
Significance: Singapore Court of Appeal clarifies the law on breach of confidence, when wrongful gain and wrongful loss damages may be claimed for same or different sets of information, and pleadings for such claims.
Can the use of a competitor’s name in your Google ad words amount to intellectual property / trademark infringement and passing off?
Maybe.
Continue reading “IP questions about rebranding Twitter to “X” “
Siemens Industry Software Inc. (formerly known as Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc) v Inzign Pte Ltd [2023] SGHC 50
Employee installed unauthorised version of Siemens’ commercial software on a company laptop for his work without permission. Siemens sued the company for copyright infringement. Court held the company vicariously liable for the employee’s infringement but not directly or primarily liable.
In Asia Petworld Pte Ltd v Sivabalan s/o Ramasami [2022] SGHC 128, the General Division of the Singapore High Court (Philip Jeyaretnam J) analysed certain categories of information to determine if they were subject to implied general confidentiality obligations post-employment. The Court affirmed a key principle that the knowledge and experience that an employee acquires during his employment is not protectable confidential information post-employment.
I’ve been researching on choice of law issues in the metaverse.
Second Life is sort of a beta-metaverse, where people lived, made love and transacted virtually through avatars. Facebook’s proposed #metaverse is just an Augmented Reality (AR) enhanced version of the concept.
I stumbled on this eyebrow-raising litigation concerning Second Life.
A study found that more than half of employees steal confidential company information when they leave their employment. Data taken include customer email addresses and contact lists. Some of these may include personal data.
Employees can use stolen data to solicit clients or trade secrets to develop competing products or services. Some have tried to sell stolen data online for millions of dollars. Such conduct may harm the company’s reputation, trade connections and business interests. The company may also be deemed to be in breach of data protection legislation.
I’ve written about this issue elsewhere. Here’re further thoughts on it.
Insert robust confidentiality clauses in employment contracts. It should be drafted bespoke to your business context to ensure it covers the type of confidential data your business deals with. Note that there are legal nuances about the scope of such clauses which affect their enforceability.
Confidentiality clauses should be drafted alongside non-solicitation, garden leave, termination and forfeiture provisions to ensure they harmonize and work together to protect the company.
Develop & implement written policies on data management, security and access.
Ensure that such policies are read, briefed and explicitly acknowledged by all employees.
Access to, and admin control of, highly secret or sensitive data should be restricted to select categories of employees.
Personal email accounts, storage devices, cloud storage applications should be prohibited. Provide company-controlled storage devices and cloud storage solutions.
Just before an employee’s termination, their company devices should be immediately returned. If there is a suspected data breach, do not conduct your own checks on the device as you may accidentally overwrite evidential data. There may be subsequent allegations raised about the chain of custody of the evidence.
Instead, consider sending it to an external IT forensic expert to conduct the review. If there are internal skilled IT personnel who are able to conduct such a forensic investigation, ensure that this is done by such personnel with their every activity logged.
The forensic investigation should be able to reveal if data has been emailed, copied, transferred or deleted.
Some IT forensic service providers include:
https://www.infinityforensics.com/
http://www.rp-ds.com/#!/our-services
https://www.rsm.global/singapore/service/advisory/digital-forensics-investigation
https://www.am-investigators.com/investigator-services/
https://private-investigator-singapore.com/digital-forensics-singapore/
There are IT solutions which enable you to detect when large amounts of data have been transferred or copied out of any company device.
Set the company VPN or intranet network to disable access to commonly used cloud storage applications like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive.
For employees who have tendered their resignations and are serving out their notice period, consider conducting a spot check on their company devices and accounts while they are still employed with the company. Check their access to data on cloud or shared servers or drives for unusual activity. If necessary, place them on garden leave.
A review of devices and accounts, suspension of accounts, and suspension of account-connected devices such as smartphones should be conducted on the last day of employment.
You will need to act fast in preparing the evidence and court papers to apply for an urgent interim injunction or court order to stop the ex-employee from further wrongful use or disclosure of the confidential data. (It is interim in the sense that it is temporary until the entire matter has been resolved.)
Other commonly sought orders in an interim injunction include:
The aforementioned interim injunction is part of the main civil claim that a business can bring against its ex-employees.
In the main civil claim, the company may claim, in addition to a permanent injunction, for monetary damages or an account of the profits. An account of profits is an order to disclose the profits made by the defendant, and to pay to the claimant such amount, derived from the wrongful use of the confidential information.
As regards damages, the claimant may claim for:
A breach of confidence per se may not amount to a criminal offence. However, if there is unauthorized access to computer systems, it may be criminal.
You may wish to report the matter to the police. The police may consider it a private civil matter. However, in some situations, especially where it concerns regulated industries like banking and finance, the police will take action. For example, in 2008, 7 ex-employees of Citibank stole customer data and left for rival bank UBS. They were charged under the Computer Misuse Act and banking customer secrecy provisions in the Banking Act.
If personal data may have been taken, you will need to assess whether the data breach notification obligations in the Personal Data Protection Act 2012 are triggered. There are certain deadlines to such assessments and notifications. Broadly, the criteria for data breach notification is significant harm to affected individuals (based on class of personal data) or significant scale (500 or more individuals).
Businesses would want to swiftly respond to data breaches by courting customers or employees who may have been poached, assuring remaining customers about their data, and patch any gaps in their data security or management processes.
In legal disputes concerning these circumstances, the following legal issues are commonly fought between parties.
A confidentiality obligation may apply because of an express contract term or under the general law of equity.
If it is based on an express contract term, the issues which follow is the scope of the term and the interpretation of the wording.
If it is based on the general law of equity, the Singapore Court of Appeal in I-Admin (Singapore) Pte Ltd v Hong Ying Ting and others [2020] SGCA 32 has held that the court must first consider two prerequisites:
a. whether the information in question has the necessary quality of confidence about it; and
b. whether it was imparted in circumstances importing an obligation of confidence. An obligation of confidence will also be found where confidential information has been accessed or acquired without the plaintiff’s knowledge or consent.
It is upon the satisfaction of these prerequisites that an action for breach of confidence may be presumed.
The presumption can be displaced where, eg, the defendant came across the information by accident or was unaware of its confidential nature or believed that there is a strong public interest in disclosing it. The burden of proof is shifted to the defendant to prove that his conscience was unaffected.
The legal framework to analyse whether data or information is confidential or trade secrets is broadly also based on (i) the wording of the contract term (if any); or (ii) general law’s categorization of types of information applied to the facts.
On (ii), the legal authority often cited is Faccenda Chicken Ltd v Fowler [1985] 1 All ER 724 (Ch). There, the English High Court classified 3 categories: (i) trivial information; (ii) confidential information which when internalized into the memory of an employee becomes part of his skill and knowledge; (iii) specific trade secrets so confidential that even if learnt by heart cannot be used by an employee after he has left the employment.
It is often held by courts that client information, client lists, pricing information, unique recipes, unique chemical formula, etc. are confidential.
Compilation of data into database based on information from the public domain may be deemed confidential (I-Admin).
While an express contractual provision on confidentiality will not apply to a third party who receives the confidential information, e.g. the new employer of the employee who left the claimant, a third party recipient may be imposed with an obligation of confidence under general equitable principles.
This is significant because it would allow the claimant to also claim against the new or prospective employer.
The approach set out in I-Admin mentioned above would apply. The question thus is whether the information is confidential and the information was imparted in circumstances importing an obligation of confidentiality.
The issue is the knowledge the recipient has about whether the information is confidential and how the recipient received the information.
If indeed it would be obvious to any reasonable person that the information is confidential, the recipient may well be subject to the confidentiality obligation.
It is often the case that employees will use the confidential data stolen to benefit themselves in a new business they begin or for a new employer.
As such, the claimant company will often also claim in breach of non-solicit of customers and/or non-compete clauses (if any).
The usual issues which then arise is whether those clauses are reasonable and thus enforceable. Or even if not, whether parts of such clauses can be severed to render the remainder enforceable.
Optimally, these clauses should have been well drafted from the outset, narrowly limited to protect only the legitimate interests of the employer, and customized to the specific employer’s context.
By Ronald JJ Wong and Nee Yingxin
If your business is experiencing a slow-down because of Circuit Breaker and social distancing measures during this COVID-19 season 19, now is the best time to repair legal foundations, review internal systems, and position your business for when things pick up again.
Here are 6 key areas you should review.
Continue reading “6 Ways Businesses Can Maximise Their Downtime During COVID-19 Season”
In the production of every film, issues surrounding intellectual property rights would naturally arise such as the ownership and exploitation of copyrights in the film, screenplay and music. Thus, it is important for all parties involved to understand the basics of intellectual property rights which arise in every film production.
The law of copyright protects expressions not ideas. Copyright protection triggers automatically when an original work is reduced to some material form. As such, a single film would contain a few separate copyrighted work – the original screenplay, the musical score, the sound recording, and the film itself.
The law of copyright grants the copyright owner exclusive rights
In general, the law of copyright grants the copyright owner the exclusive rights to exploit the copyrighted work for duration of its protection. In Singapore, the law of copyright is governed by the Copyright Act (Cap. 63).
For the screenplay and musical score, the duration of copyright protection is the duration of the author’s life plus seventy (70) years.
For the sound recording and film, the duration of copyright protection is seventy (70) years from the date of first publication.
For a novel, screenplay or musical score, the copyright owner has the exclusive right to:
For the sound recording, the copyright owner has the exclusive right to:
For the film itself, the copyright owner has the exclusive right to:
Copyright protection also extends to derivative works, i.e. works which are based upon existing works and which contain some element of material alteration. For example, a screenplay adapted from a novel would have its own separate copyright protection. Thus, to have the right to make a film, you would need to have the express authorisation of every copyright owner whose work you will rely upon.
The transfer of ownership or rights
Ownership of copyright may be assigned to another even if the copyrighted work has yet to exist, provided that the assignment is in writing and signed by the assignor. Thus, if a sound recording is made pursuant to an agreement, the commissioning party would be the copyright owner.
The copyright owner may grant exclusive or non-exclusive rights to another through a licence in writing and signed by the copyright owner. An exclusive licence authorises the licensee, to the exclusion of all other persons, to do an act which the copyright owner has the exclusive right to do.
Defence to copyright infringement – fair dealing
A fair dealing with a work would not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the work. For example, dealing with a work for the purposes of research or study may constitute a fair dealing.
Under section 35(2) of the Copyright Act (Cap.62), the following factors are considered in determining whether an act constitutes fair dealing:
The rights of a copyright owner is governed by the law of each country
There is no single worldwide copyright law, so the copyright in each work varies from country to country. In general, a work is protected in the country which the work was first published or which the author of the work resides in. Pursuant to the Berne Convention and TRIPS Agreement, a work that is first published in one country will trigger copyright protection in the other signatory countries as if it were published there. This means that the copyright owner would own separate copyrights in each country, and the corresponding rights and remedies would vary accordingly.
Producers may want to consider registering a trademark in a particular film title if there are long-term prospects such as producing a sequel or merchandising opportunities (think “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars”).
A trademark is essentially any sign that is capable of being represented graphically and which is capable of distinguishing goods or services provided in the course of trade from a particular origin. Registering a trademark gives the owner the right to control the use of the trademark. Consumers are protected as well when they wish to acquire a particular quality of good from a particular source.
In general, the appearance of trademarks in a film (e.g. a scene along a shopping street which features Starbucks) will not amount to trademark infringement as it is not “used in the course of trade” and will not mislead or confuse consumers as to the source of the goods. Instead, companies pay to have their products feature in films as a means to subtly advertise.
Series Contents
1: An Overview: 3 Things for Film Producers
2: Understand the Different Types of Business Structures
3: The 3 Important Approaches To Negotiating A Fair Deal
4: Negotiating A Fair Deal With Writers
5: Raising Finances For Your Film
6: An Introduction To Completion Bonds
7: Distributing Your Film – Entering Into Distribution Licence Agreements
8: Get To Know Your Film’s Intellectual Property Rights – Copyright And Trademark Protection