Someday, China may look back at the Edison Chen scandal and thank the man for its privacy laws

China privacy laws, Edison ChenChina currently has no privacy laws, but that may change, if lawyer Yu Guofu from the Beijing-based Internet Society of China has his way. In an interview with the China Youth Daily 《中国青年报》, Yu made the following comments:

There is no privacy protection law in China so far, nor is there a single item in any laws and regulations that covers privacy protection... The only mention of privacy is in a judicial explanation by the Supreme Court of China that focused on the protection of the right of reputation... Moreover, there had been scarcely any research on the right of privacy for a long time in China...
He also goes into the "Oh, let's protect all the little children" argument:
"And let's not forget the bad influence those pictures have exerted on Chinese Internet users which include not only adults but children too," he said, saying that the picture would do "unredeemable damage" to children...

"Anyone could be the victim in the next photo scandal without a privacy protection law," he said.

Yu advocates drafting China's first law on privacy protection "as soon as possible" because a strong privacy law could have "prevented the circulation of pornographic photos of leading Hong Kong celebrities having sex with each other". Look, we are all for the enactment of a privacy law but to say that such a law would have prevented the circulation of those pics is to stretch the truth a bit. Clearly, this guy knows nothing about the nature of the Internet, or the nature of porn, or both. Besides, Bill Gates said so.

As you can see, the incident has opened a legal can of worms both in Hong Kong and China, and while the Special Administrative Region has its own privacy law, it has been powerless to protect Edison Chen and his bed buddies. Meanwhile, the man at the centre of it all is now invoking another law with an even bigger stick in the territory: the copyright law. Edison is now demanding that the authorities carry out a criminal probe to see who infringed on his copyrights. We hope he strikes a windfall with his copyright claims!

Now let's take a look at what the Hong Kong copyright law says:

Hong Kong law prescribes that people can get up to four years in prison along with a fine of HK$50,000 (US$7,611.74) if they are found to have copied art work for sales or renting without the producer's consent, the report said.

That means, ladies and gentlemen, if you've been sending the said pictures to your friends in a zip file via MSN (without having your friends pay you for it of course), by all means continue to do so because you haven't run afoul of any law! The police coming after you for what you do on MSN would be an invasion of your privacy of course, but then again, the privacy law hasn't been enacted in China yet.

And by the way, after Edison turned over his pink laptop to the Commercial Crime Bureau, the bureau has made the shocking revelation that there is yet another set of obscene pictures (possibly including intercourse) that hasn't yet made its rounds on the internet. The pictures feature other female celebrities not currently named in the scandal. We hope the detectives will send us those pictures soon respect the privacy and copyrights of all involved and not circulate the pics. The mystery man, "Kira", it is rumoured, has either been silenced with a big fat bribe of HKD5 million or brutally exterminated by some triad.

Previously on Shanghaiist

Photo from sunside.

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By Kenneth Tan in on February 26, 2008 11:38 PM Comments 11 Likes Likes

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