SCIT speaks about proposed anti-spam legislation

Following is the transcript (English portion) of the Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology (SCIT), Mr John Tsang, speaking to the media after delivering a speech on controlling spam at the luncheon meeting of the Foreign Correspondents' Club today (April 28):

Reporter: I am going to ask you something about spamming. There are some groups saying that if you introduce legislation, it would appear that the Government is intervening in the free market and infringing free speech. How do you respond to that?

SCIT: I think as in all things we need to draw a proper balance. On the one hand, we need to guard against people's privacy, people's preference not to be interfered with junk spam and so forth. On the other hand, we also need to take care of the needs of the small and medium size enterprises who may use this sort of means to get business. So we need to find a balance. We have been doing some consultations in the community. When we have some definitive measures that we want to legislate, we will do further consultation and hopefully the community will guide us in the direction that we want to proceed.

Reporter: Can I ask you one thing about the BT thing? The industry is sending threatening letters to people who download illegally. There is no legislation in Hong Kong. How do you think it will help the industry and other people to overcome the intellectual property problem?

SCIT: There is legislation in Hong Kong that would allow the film industry to take civil action against people who infringe against their rights. They can do that. They need to proceed according to their legal advice. They will continue with that. We also encourage that because that has definitely a strong deterrent effect on would-be infringers.

Reporter: Do you think making an email blacklist for sending mass emails will allow other countries to come to Hong Kong to do offshore financial services? Will they see that as a potential for a safer haven for that kind of service?

SCIT: Possibly. The different ISPs now in Hong Kong all have their own blacklists. Different ISPs carry their own blacklist of notorious spammers. Each one of them does that. What we want to do is to get the ISPs together so that they could have a master blacklist that they could share among themselves, so that they would be able to get the more notorious spammers out of the way. They can filter it through. It would help people not to get the unsolicited things that they do not want to get. It is one way of dealing with the problem.

Reporter: Does it encourage financial offshore services to come to Hong Kong? Is that one of the reasons behind that legislation?

SCIT: That could be potentially one of the outcomes. But we are not just thinking about that as the primary issue. What we are trying to do is to get rid of the spam problem in Hong Kong right now. All these other by-products will be an added bonus if we could get them.

Reporter: Are you under pressure by any industry player to come up with the spam legislation?

SCIT: We have been planning to do anti-spam legislation for quite some time. The pressure has always been there, because it creates huge economic cost on the society. This is something that as Government, we should do to bring better and more public goods to the society.

Report: Should it be part of the works of the private sector?

SCIT: There are certain things that are the work of the private sector. That is why we need a whole basket of measures. But there are also things that will require the coordination of the Government, because we are talking about public goods now, and things are becoming so massive that it just goes across the society. This is something that is proper for us to do.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)

Ends/Thursday, April 28, 2005