The incongruity of Hong Kong, a first-world city with a developed economy, having a third-world copyright protection system is so apparent that no one would ever bother to question the urgent need for the city to update its copyright legislation.

With previous attempts to amend and update its copyright law having failed to achieve anything concrete for lack of consensus in the community, Hong Kong has had to put up with an outdated copyright law since 2006, which has provided no protection for digital copyrights.

That Hong Kong is lagging far behind most of the developed economies in the world when it comes to copyright protection - specifically in the protection of digital copyrights - makes it imperative for the city to update its copyright legislation without further delay.

In an effort to diversify the local economy and thereby help to tackle some of the city's most pressing, deep-seated problems such as the lack of career opportunities for the youth, slow upward social mobility and a growing wealth gap, the SAR government has developed an ambitious vision to develop a knowledge-based economy with an emphasis on innovation and creativity.

If the city is serious about realizing such an ambition, this only makes it all the more imperative that the Legislative Council enact without delay the proposed Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2014, which seeks to extend copyright protection to the digital realm, particularly the Internet.

The proposed bill meets international standards and strikes a fair balance between the legitimate interests of copyright owners, users and the public by adopting the "fair dealing" doctrine.

It is used by many common law jurisdictions, like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, India, South Africa and the UK in their copyright legislation. Indeed, it is more widely practiced around the world than the "fair use" standard demanded by some opponents of the amendment bill.

By providing wide-ranging copyright exemptions to the unlicensed use of copyrighted works for purposes such as parody, satire, pastiche, caricature, criticism, commenting, review, quotation, education, research and news reporting, the "fair dealing" clause of the bill will ensure Hong Kong people's freedom of expression and creation, as well as academic freedom, while extending protection to digital copyrights.

No campaign that works against the enactment of the amendment bill stands up to reason - to say nothing of resorting to violence of any form to block passage of the bill in LegCo. Violence achieves nothing. It will only erode the rule of law which Hong Kong people cherish very much.

(HK Edition 12/16/2015 page9)