SINGAPORE Law and Practice Contributed by: Lim Chong Kin, Drew & Napier LLC
any business without a licence), among oth - ers. At the time of writing, details of enforce - ment action in this front are not published on the IMDA website. • Under Section 88(1) of the GCA, the GRA is empowered to revoke or disapply licences granted under the GCA if the licensee has contravened or failed to comply with its licence conditions, the provision of a standard applicable to the licensee, or any direction given to the licensee in lieu of a licence revo - cation, among other measures. At the time of writing, details of enforcement action on this front are not published on the GRA website. 9.3 Intellectual Property IP challenges faced by game developers in Sin - gapore include video game cloning and game content rights. Copyright Protection and Infringement Video games typically comprise multiple IP pro - tectible components, such as music, art, plot and source code. Examples of works protected by the CA include: • an authorial work – ie, a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work (Section 9 of the CA); • a published edition of an authorial work; • a sound recording; • a film; • a broadcast; or • a cable programme. To protect their IP in a virtual environment, game developers will first need to establish authorship and ownership of copyright in the work in ques - tion. For there to be copyright infringement, a quali - tatively substantial amount of the original work must have been copied. For example, in the con -
text of video game cloning, this can stray into copyright infringement territory if the creative aspects of the game are copied. Under the CA, a compilation of data may be protected as a literary work if it constitutes an intellectual creation by reason of the selection or arrangement of its contents. In the context of compilations, the compiler must have exercised sufficient creativity in selecting or arranging the material within the compilation to cloak the origi - nal expression with copyright. Thus, it has been held by the Singapore courts in a case involving two publishers of phone directories that such data is not protected by copyright law (see Glob - al Yellow Pages Ltd v Promedia Directories Pte Ltd [2017] 2 SLR 185). That said, in Singapore, the extent of copyright protection over modern-day video games has yet to be conclusively determined. It remains to be seen, in the context of video games, what level of creativity is necessary for a selection or arrangement of facts or data to receive copyright protection. Trade Mark Issues Apart from copyright issues, identifying signs or indicia such as video game titles, logos and gamer tags may also be protected under Singa - pore trade mark law. The key question to con - sider is whether the game developer owns reg - istered trade marks that cover the video games or similar goods/services. If any signs have been created through the development of the video game, the video game developer may wish to register such trade marks under the Singapore Trade Marks Act 1998, as the registration of a trade mark over these signs would confer on the game developer exclusive rights to use and authorise others to use the
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