Q: Is right of reply a law here, as in it is stated explicitly under some act?
Reply: Not in law but in practice. (Or in Latin, de jure vs de facto .)
There is no law demanding a right of reply. But when foreign newsmagazines do not publish a letter, they can and have been gazetted as "declared foreign newspaper[s]" under the NPPA. The practice has also been that the letters must be published either unedited or else edited to the satisfaction of the press spokesman.
Local papers of course are directly under the NPPA.
Q: What Is Difference Between Deregulation, Reregulation And Liberalization?
Deregulation is the removal of regulation. An example in the media would be the requirement that television programmes can only have a maximum of 14 minutes of advertising air time.
Because of the general trend towards greater reliance on market forces and away from regulations, deregulation can be said to be a common phenomenon worldwide.
The problem with deregulation is that it has actually required regulation in other areas. That is, the assumption that rules are unnecessary has been shown to be false. That is, there is some logic behind most of the rules that are in place. The result is that there has been a need to re-regulate.
Therefore, the word deregulation has been shown to be a misnomer. The better word therefore is liberalisation. That is, some relaxation of rules without implying that there would be removal.
The words are used interchangeably between deregulation and liberalisation. My point is simply to note that it is often not possible to remove regulations only. Instead, the issue is to determine which rules may be relaxed.
This approach works most of the time. However, if there are radical changes, it may be possible to simply remove entire bureaucracies. The American deregulation movement was started by the abolition of the Civil Aviation Board. The way to understand that would be to take away one statutory board in Singapore. (I could not think of one.) The removal has certainly increased air travel in the US. But there are also concerns about the safety record of aircraft. Also, there is some evidence that the benefit was more medium term that long. Having said that, air travel in the US is cheap. The air fare from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur is $200 for a round trip. The same airfare in the US for the distance would be less than S$100.
Q1. Does the SCAP Appendix A apply to such websites on Singapore servers?
Reply: In theory, yes, SCAP should cover it.
Q2. If it does, how does the ASAS check as to who're the owners of the websites?
Reply: You can find out who owns any website by going to NSI to check. Go to
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois.
Type in the domain name (without the www) and then click on the name again when it
appears on the page showing that it is not available.
For an SG
domain name, go to http://www.nic.net.sg/ and type in the domain name (without the www but including the .sg). The owner will appear on the right.
For other countries, you check using a search engine to look for the registration authority or body.
Q3. What can the SCAP do against such advertisers?
Reply: Not much. It depends on media owners, ie the website owner. Hence the only enforcement has been through law against those who violate laws,which is outside SCAP.
Q4 Does the ASAS prevent advertisers sending you junk e-mail (is that called spamming?)
Answer: ASAS does not regulate spam, which is a situation analogous to too many ads. For traditional media, it was assumed that the marketplace could handle it. Too many ads and people will be turned off, responses will fall.
The Singapore ISPs are taking
unilateral action, for example, by limiting mass mailings to 99 (and as low as 25) at one time.
Q: How does the Defamation Act mitigate the harshness of the common law?
Reply: The Defamation Act contains several defences not available in common law. For example, the defence of innocent dissemination in S7, apology to reduce damages in S10, defacto absolute privilege of judicial proceedings if the report is fair and accurate and contemporaneous (S.11), reduction of damages if the plaintiff has recovered damages elsewhere (S.16).
Q: I understand that it increases the defences for those sued such as "fair comment".
Reply: S9 "increases" the defence in the sense that you do not have to prove irrelevant facts if the facts that are relied upon for fair comment are proven. It's a very small increase.
Q: What does it mean that the Act does not state the law?
Reply: The Act does not state the law because it does not tell you what constitutes libel, who can be sued, etc. For these, you have to fall back on the common law, ie case law.
Q: Are censorship and regulation the same?
Reply: I treat censorship as a subset of content regulation. Both often (though not always) have the same result of restricting content. (An example of a content regulation rule that encourages content production is copyright.) In my definition of censorship however, the difference is that censorship is often unwanted by and unacceptable to the sender and intended receiver. But regulations on content are usually accepted by both sender and receiver. Example of acceptable content regulation: copyright, defamation, decency and taste standards.
Sometimes, it is not easy to tell which is which--if, say, an Indonesian newspaper does not want to publish the photo of a bloodied severed head on a pole, is that censorship or is that a question of taste and decency?
Oh, there is a final difference--regulation sounds nicer than censorship.