1998 – Odex founded by Peter Go for the purpose of licensing and bringing in videos ranging from drama to animation of all kinds into Singapore.

2000 – Odex formed the animation section, to license and bring in Japanese animation into Singapore. Thus changing the whole company’s direction.

2003 – Odex formed the Anti Video Piracy Association of Singapore (AVPAS) to fight video piracy in Singapore, of which the Vice-President is Peter Go, who himself signed the letter to authorise his own Odex to act on their behalf. (Why did Peter Go formed AVPAS?????)

2007 May – Odex started sending out letters to illegal downloaders of their licensed anime for settlement of a sum between $3,000 to $5,000. Further changing the company’s direction. Many parents were scared because in its letter Odex threatened criminal charges, which it has no right to do so, and so paid up for their children according the the sum of monies demanded.

2007 Aug – Court ruled that Odex has no right of civil action because it is
not the lawful licensed agent for such action. That means Odex was collecting the monies illegally. That means also SingNet had breached the govt’s regulations regarding Code of Practice for ISPs. Read what Judge Lau said:

“In this application, the Defendant is asked to disclose the identities of subscribers whom they owe a contractual as well as regulatory duty via the Code of Practice for ISPs to keep subscriber information confidential. I cannot justify compelling the Defendant give discovery (which is to order them to do what they have undertaken not to do)”.

Ivan’s right in that there are no American-style John Doe “class action” suits in Singapore. Raffles Town Club was a “representative action”, which is a very different legal animal.

The legal letters are not demands to pay fines. Instead, they are offers of settlement in exchange for not commencing legal proceedings against you.

The difference is this. Say, you get punched in the face.
(A) You can either report it to the police, who will ask you to make a Magistrate’s complaint etc etc which could result in a fine or jail term. This is prosecuted by the Public Prosecutor.
(B) You can also sue the guy and get monetary damages as compensation. Here, you engage your own lawyers.

ODEX can threaten (B) but cannot threaten (A) because (A) is within the prerogative of the Attorney-General’s Chambers. My guess is that ODEX’s lawyers (Rajah and Tann?) were not very smart by including mentions of S 136 of the Copyright Act in their letters, because I believe (although I am really not sure) that they cannot do that.

What you pay for is in return for ODEX not getting their lawyers to sue you for infringing their (limited, as we now know) copyrights. Ignore these at your peril if you wish to allow civil litigation to commence against you. Always seek legal advice. Here, they can recover damages against you, but they would have to quantify this by proving that they actually lost money.

Just a thought: if ODEX does not actually release many of the titles it has non-exclusive licences over, can it be said to have made losses? This will affect how much it can actually recover in court. Hence, always seek your own legal advice. It might just save you some money if your downloading activities don’t actually cause that much damage.

Don’t get me wrong: copyright infringement is wrong. At the same time however, recovering more than what ODEX deserves is also wrong.

Finally, I think there are professional conduct rules that prohibit lawyers from contacting the other party’s client directly. Imagine if you already kena sued and have engaged lawyers to take care of you. Suddenly next day these lawyers come knocking on your door instead. It’s unethical. That’s probably why ODEX turns away people who bring lawyers. Their lawyers should contact Rajah and Tann instead.