No consensus after public consultation on parody law

The government has failed to come up with a proposal on how to better protect parody makers, after a four-month public consultation found that opinions on amending the law are deeply divided.

None of the three options listed in the consultation document gained majority support from the more than 2,000 submissions received from web users and copyright owners.

Of the three options, one was to clarify criminal sanction provisions to specify that parody makers would not be prosecuted unless their work caused "more than trivial" economic damage to copyright owners. The second was to exempt parodies from existing criminal offences.

The third was to exempt parody makers from civil and criminal liabilities as long as they met "fair dealing" requirements - such as the work not being of a profit-making nature and its degree of similarity with the original - to be decided by a court.

The only common ground between web users and copyright owners was the opinion that only creators of non-commercial works should receive protection, a government source said.

By this principle, the League of Social Democrats should not be protected for printing and selling a T-shirt with a parodied version of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong's logo.