Registry
No. NWB 16/6 DRAFT
SECURITY CLASSIFICATION
Top-Secret, Becret. Confidential. Restricted. Unclassified---
PRIVACY MARKING
No 479
In Confidence
C.D.
R -5 AUG 1968
DBCINE
D 5/5
To:-
CONFIDENT IAL
SAVING DESPATCH
The Governor,
Hong Kong
Type 1 + 76
From
Secretary of State
Telephone No. & Ext.
Department
Alo 479 f5 August, 1968
1968.
Your Saving Despatch No. 211 of 10 February
Copyright Legislation.
An interim reply was sent to you in a letter from the Department (CR 4/2/44 of 22 May), as a result of which you felt that
immediate consultation with us and with the
Board of Trade was desirable and sent
Mr. J.W.D. Hobley, Assistant to your Law Officers, to London for this purpose.
it is
2.
As you will be aware, Mr. Hobley had
useful consultations with officials concerned
and also with our Deputy Legal Adviser; now possible to comment, with better under-
standing, upon the issues raised by the proposed legislation.
3. In the course of the consultations consideration was given first to the question of whether the Licence to Rediffusion (Hong Kong) Limited conferred the exclusive right to
relay broadcast television material and
Afenacted whether the draft copyright legislation would
take away that right and, as it were,
constitute a breach of contract.
4. In the opinion of our Legal Advisers, the licence did confer on Rediffusion (Hong Kong)
Limited the exclusive right to relay broadcast
television material, even if, as Mr. Hobley stated, the Hong Kong Government records of the negotiations leading up to the grant of the
licence showed that this was not then the
Government's intention. They consider that paragraph (b) of the licence gave Rediffusion
the exclusive right to maintain a service
distributed from their stations by wire of any
televisi on programmes and did not limit the service to their own originated programmes or to one programme; and they also consider that it would be difficult to justify taking away from Rediffusion the right to distribute by wire
/ broadcast
...
W(B)L 51-74 33
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