Cases of Creators Seeking Help for Plagiarising of Their Artworks and Resolution for Such Cases

1 Ms See Jinli Jean asked the Minister for Law (a) for each year from 2019 to 2024, how many cases has the Ministry received from creators seeking help about the plagiarising of their artworks; (b) how many cases have been satisfactorily resolved and what are the remedies; (c) what steps are taken to ensure that businesses know of the need to engage the creators on using their intellectual property (IP); and (d) what avenues are available to creators to get affordable help to enforce their IP rights.

The Minister of State for Law (Mr Murali Pillai) (for the Minister for Law): Mr Speaker, Sir, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) runs weekly IP legal clinics where creators can receive complimentary legal advice from practising lawyers about enforcement and infringement of IP rights. This includes understanding available options if they find that their rights have potentially been infringed. About one in four of the sessions touched on copyright infringement. Due to the confidential nature of these sessions, IPOS is not privy to the details of individual cases, including their progress and outcomes.

Besides IPOS’ IP legal clinics, creators can consider alternative dispute resolution (ADR), such as mediation which is often more cost-effective and expeditious, compared to litigation. IPOS runs various mediation support programmes, including collaborating with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center to promote ADR by offering reduced rates.

IPOS also provides a variety of initiatives to increase public awareness of IP rights and build up IP capabilities. For example, IPOS’ subsidiary IPOS International runs the IP Academy, which conducts courses to raise the understanding of IP amongst businesses.

In addition, IPOS recently signed a three-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Visual, Audio, Creative Content Professionals Association (Singapore), or VICPA, of which I believe the hon Member Ms See is part of the leadership team, to provide support to creative freelance professionals and young creators in the areas of IP education and management, capacity building and resource sharing. The MOU builds on collaborations between IPOS and VICPA since 2021. Working with VICPA and other partners continues to be an important approach to supporting creators across the multi-faceted issues that they face.

Mr Speaker: Ms Jean See.

Ms See Jinli Jean (Nominated Member): I thank the Minister of State for the response. I just wanted to understand better. For creators with less means, in terms of financial means, what is the assistance that they can look towards the Ministry or IPOS to provide. Secondly, there are businesses, increasingly, using ChatGPT or different means of ChatGPT to procure or devise artworks through what I would call plagiarism, but the businesses might not know. When this happens, what are the steps the Ministry can take to assist local creators to enforce such rights?

Mr Murali Pillai: Sir, I am obliged to Ms See for her supplementary question. In relation to supporting creators who come from less means and how do they enforce their rights, one thing to note is that, like for all fellow Singaporeans, they are entitled to legal aid as long as the means test and the merits test are satisfied. That is something that is also available to those who own creative rights.

In addition, as I mentioned in my answer to the hon Member Ms See, we have been running legal clinics for quite some time and the businesses may wish to avail themselves of these legal clinics which are run on a complimentary basis. In addition, IPOS has already commenced some of the capacity-building initiatives, for example, the MOU with VICPA and hopefully, this may be a suitable avenue as well for these creators.

Mr Speaker: Ms See.

Ms See Jinli Jean: I would just like to put across a point that while the creators can get some level of assistance and education, then I think the request to the Ministry is whether it can consider also mounting similar education for businesses, especially as such artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools become more popular and to educate businesses on how to seek IP rights from creators.

Mr Murali Pillai: We note the hon Member's suggestion. Perhaps this is an area that we can work on with VICPA and other businesses.