The Streetdirectory.com Saga
SIM JUNHUI (Juris Sub-Editor)
Any well-informed Singaporean would be acquainted with the online website Streetdirectory.com and its useful maps of Singapore. Encounter an unfamiliar street name or building, and a quick dash to the computer will solve all problems. Today’s Internet-savvy world no longer requires recourse to poring over printed material.
However, Virtual Map (Singapore) Ptd Ltd, the company providing this online map-service, had recently been embroiled in a series of legal disputes. One such case may help as a springboard for further thoughts on copyright law and the idea of intellectual property.
In Virtual Map (Singapore) Ptd Ltd v. Suncool International Pte Ltd, [2005] 2 Sing. L.R. 157, Virtual Map brought an action against Suncool International Ptd Ltd for copyright infringement after it reproduced on its own website a cartographic image found on Virtual Map’s website. The court granted summary judgment in Virtual Map’s favour. Appealing to the High Court, Suncool claimed that triable issues existed and that summary judgment should not have been granted. Suncool alleged that Virtual Map did not enjoy independent copyright in its maps because copyright in the raw cartographic materials remained in the Singapore Land Authority, which should have been joined in the suit.
To satisfy the court that Virtual Map had independent copyright in its maps, the High Court judge held that it must have expended “skill, effort and labour in creating the work”. A person may acquire independent copyright in his work even if it is derived in part from an initial source in which he has no copyright. Through skill, effort and labour, translated into “material alteration or embellishment” of the initial source, the person can transform the initial source into a new original work. He is then awarded copyright over this new original work, notwithstanding and independently of the initial source and any copyright over it.
On the facts, the judge was satisfied that Virtual Map expended skill, effort and labour to create its maps. Virtual Map thus acquired copyright over its new original work notwithstanding and independently of its initial source of SLA’s cartographic work and raw material.
This idea of expending skill, effort and labour brings to mind John Locke and his ideas on labour and property. Briefly, John Locke opined that property was the result of labour. Through one’s efforts, one acquired property in objects which did not previously belong to anyone. Thus, by expending one’s labour in picking a fruit from a tree which belongs to no one, one acquires property in the fruit. Likewise, biting the fruit, chewing it and swallowing transforms it into one’s property.
These ideas of labour and property no longer seem to have much effect on our lives in the physical world . Where most has been “propertised”, there is little that remains untouched to be acquired through one’s labours. No land remains out there to be seized by some adventurer. Nor, I daresay, are there any fruits left unclaimed, waiting to be picked.
But things are not quite the same in the world of ideas, and this is the case in the world online, or in the real world. After all, ideas remain the same, wherever they are. The only difference, perhaps, is that publication online is much easier than in print, explaining why copyright violations may be more rampant in cyberspace than in the real world. All the same, ideas are waiting to be discovered, distilled and made one’s own. They wait to be “propertised”. Through “skill, effort and labour”, we can carve out property in the intellectual, artistic, literary, dramatic or musical domains, amongst others. And they become ours to use and dispose of as we please.
The consumer might of course bewail his loss of ease of access to inexpensive data. But much has to be said about protecting intellectual property, wherever it is found. This is not a question of mere cost, but of the fundamental idea of property – the concept of meum et tuum. To live in a world without the concept of property, where there is no yours or mine, is often unimaginable nowadays. Communism was the latest advocate of a property-less society – and we know how that turned out. If one obtains something by the sweat of one’s brow, it is generally not easily surrendered. If one knows that no matter the effort put into one’s work, it will belong not to oneself, but to all and sundry, including those who neither work nor labour, one would unsurprisingly be disinclined to continue. Thus, unsurprisingly, the idea of a property-less society, or at least one in which all have property in everything, is unlikely to truly thrive and succeed. Therefore, the average consumer should look past his own immediate gain to see and respect the skill, effort and labour of others.
This brings us back to Virtual Map. One may invest skill, effort and labour in something and claim a copyright in it. It becomes one’s property and one’s own. One may defend it from the incursions of others. But if that something came illegally from someone else, and if that someone else can establish his own copyright in that something, then one might just have walked into a nasty legal pit.
Ironically, Virtual Map was itself sued by the Singapore Land Authority for breach of copyright for using their materials without permission. This was of course the high-profile case of Virtual Map (Singapore) Pte Ltd v Singapore Land Authority, [2009] 2 Sing. L.R. 558. Perhaps Virtual Map did not understand the basic principle that if it wanted its own intellectual property to be respected, it ought to have respected that of others. Therein lies a lesson that everyone should learn.
“If one knows that no matter the effort put into one’s work, it will belong not to oneself, but to all and sundry, including those who neither work nor labour, one would unsurprisingly be disinclined to continue.”
You might wish to reconsider the veracity of that claim, in light of ample empirical evidence going against it.
The very fact that your SLR blog runs on WordPress, PHP, MySQL, running on a Linux server, all of the above which are open source works built up and upon by volunteers contributing their efforts for free, should give you pause before making that claim.
In fact the very explosion of creativity emanating from Silicon Valley is built entirely upon the freedoms provided by open source software.
Would you like to reconsider the above claim?
Another question you should ponder over.
Even if Virtual Maps had not been taken out by the SLA, it would have been completely destroyed in the marketplace by Google Maps. Which is provided for free.
If we go by your reasoning above, Google must be behaving in a completely irrational fashion by offering something for free.
I think the reality you must consider is that the realm of ideas is a very different one from one of physical reality. The very fact that ideas are non-rival render the traditional “property” paradigm not entirely applicable.
The internet is the perfect example of “creative destruction” inherent in any dynamic free market. The question is how to tie the infinite abundance and replicability of ideas to something else that is inherently scarce, rather than to create artificial scarcity in ideas through the usage of “intellectual property”.
actually i think wordpress has the free and premium version. anyway, doesn’t google get its revenue from advertising? so its aim is not to make ppl pay for the site but to increase hits (and one way is to provide stuff for free). but then again google did run into some legal trouble with googlebooks.
@alamode:
I think you are referring to WordPress.com the hosting service as opposed to WordPress.org, from which the entire sourcecode of “WordPress” the software can be downloaded for free.
Wordpress, the software, is licensed under the GPL, which enforces the rule that the software has to be released with all source code available, and further if you make any modifications to the code you must also release that source code as well.
Now this is in opposition to the above claim that if people know that no one will pay for their work, then no person will create new works. This claim is patently false. The fact is thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, routinely create all kinds of works without ever being paid for it (in the monetary sense). Open source software (which on its own consist of a significant proportion of all software ever created) is just but one example. Wikipedia is another. And then there is this blog, and millions of other blogs out there where people never get paid for what they write.
Empirical evidence does not square with the claim set forth by the write of this post.
“Communism was the latest advocate of a property-less society – and we know how that turned out.”
There is one other argument in particular which I think deserves critique. Communism as an ideology claimed to abolish the concept of property, but the actual effect is to vest all ownership in the state.
Thus the reason why communism failed was because the state had a monopoly over ALL property in existence within the borders of its power. That presents multiple reasons for failure: the lack of a price mechanism in the market, the coordination problem between central planning and the needs and wants of society, the inefficiencies/corruption/abuse of power inherent in any monopoly.
And precisely for that reason we should critically examine the nature of copyrights. Near perpetual and ever broader copyrights create monopolies over ideas, resulting in the exact same problems whenever there are monopolies.
Another question you should ponder over.
Even if Virtual Maps had not been taken out by the SLA, it would have been completely destroyed in the marketplace by Google Maps. Which is provided for free.
If we go by your reasoning above, Google must be behaving in a completely irrational fashion by offering something for free.
I think the reality you must consider is that the realm of ideas is a very different one from one of physical reality. The very fact that ideas are non-rival render the traditional “property” paradigm not entirely applicable.
The internet is the perfect example of “creative destruction” inherent in any dynamic free market. The question is how to tie the infinite abundance and replicability of ideas to something else that is inherently scarce, rather than to create artificial scarcity in ideas through the usage of “intellectual property”.
Thank you for reading Juris and for giving many useful and refreshing comments.
For further clarification, I think I should comment on a statement I made in my article (“if one knows…one would surprisingly be disinclined to continue”).
That statement, in my opinion, either does not appropriately express my sentiments, or has unfortunately been misinterpreted. Far be it from me to suggest that no one would work for free. Surely some example of altruism must exist in our world today! Instead, I merely sought to explain, or rather express, the possible disinclination or reluctance to work for free of those copyright holders or creators who did not wish to work for free, arguably a sizeable proportion of the population. This different perspective was meant as a contrast with the sentiments of the consumer who would, perhaps, prefer a world where everything was free.
Thank you once again for reading Juris.
[...] The Streetdirectory.com Saga by Sim Junhui (here) [...]
My comments on virtual maps, its a great tool and help many real estate personal in their works. Cool concept.
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