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Following is the transcript of remarks made by the Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Mr Gregory So, on the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2014 at a media session in the Legislative Council Complex today (December 9):
Reporter: Is it possible for the Government to reconsider the pan-democratic lawmakers' amendment proposals in the additional week?
Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development: I want to make this point very clear - this amendment has been worked on for a long period of time. My colleagues have been engaging various stakeholders including netizens, quite proactively, especially over the course of the last two years. They have attended public forums, and actually actively invited netizens to discuss with them the content of these amendments more than 20 times over the course of the last two years, in addition to the 24 meetings of the Bills Committee and in addition to the public consultation that we conducted two years ago. So this is a long process and this final product that we have on the table is actually a balancing act, and we have balanced all that to produce what we have today. Not to say that we will not look at the other issue at the subsequent stage. We already promise after this bill has gone through the legislature, we will look at those issues like user-generated content, like fair use, like contract override. These we will look at. These three areas at this point of time there is no consensus. You need longer deliberation, hopefully not like 2006 until now - hopefully the process will be much shorter. But let's take stock of what we have, and just take this gain now, this balance that we have. And now we will look at these issues - we already promise we will look at these issues. But we need to have a process.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Issued at HKT 16:40
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