Law in Singapore

[alyssatan]

Hi,

Can anyone advise on the legal affirmations/guidelines/restrictions regarding the use of caricatures of famous people on a website in Singapore? E.g. Donald Trump, Richard Branson.

They are to be used as the results to an online personality quiz. When a person completes the quiz, we will link their personality to someone famous like one of the above. We aren’t using their exact photos – just caricatures and names.

Thanks!
Alyssa

[jpatokal]

Can anyone advise on the legal affirmations/guidelines/restrictions regarding the use of caricatures of famous people on a website in Singapore? E.g. Donald Trump, Richard Branson.

Yes, these people are called lawyers. bada boom crash

Given that Singapore's defamation law is insane, why not host the site in the US, where parody is well-protected? Even a .sg site can be hosted outside the country, nobody will ever know.

[brittanny]

i hope this wikipage will answer your question concerned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Singapore

more importantly, i think the question you should ponder is: who owns the copyright of the caricature?
ie. you don't want copyright issues with the copyright owner to begin with

[Strong Eagle]

I would say that so long as you are not using caricatures of Singapore people, where you could be subject to rather draconian defamation laws, you wouldn't have any problem... unless of course, the caricatured person decided to venue shop and file charges here. You'd probably have to pull them down and apologize.

But as the other poster noted, who owns the copyright of the caricatures and do you have rights to use them.

Unless your caricatures or their representations were truly slanderous I suspect it wouldn't be too much of a problem.