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Note: The recent incident involving pictures circulated from Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen's computer has raised many issues relating to the copyright of photographs and just who owns them. Chris Bisogni reports
Question: How many laws did Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen break when thousands of photographs of him with various women were spread around the world?
Answer: None.
However, the public hysteria and media madness that surrounded the issue could have had many thinking otherwise. Edison Chen did nothing wrong (assuming those in the photographs taken from his computer were all consenting adults, which by all reports they were). The main culprits have been and are being dealt with by the police in various jurisdictions, particularly Hong Kong and mainland China. But the police have been criticized in some circles for their mishandling of the case and their inaccurate interpretation of which laws were broken. (The Obscene Articles Tribunal for classification has since ruled that the images were in fact not obscene but merely indecent.)
The scandal covers three major areas of the law, those being copyright laws, personal data privacy laws and the Control of Indecent and Obscene Articles Ordinance.
So what does it all mean?
Perhaps unbeknown to many who have no doubt read the hundreds of media reports and participated in various office gossip sessions, Chen owns the copyright...