Singapore:
Singapore has outlawed “revenge porn” and “cyber-flashing” — sending unsolicited pix of one’s personal parts — the state-of-the-art country to clamp down on sexual offenses committed online. “Revenge porn,” when ex-companions share intimate snapshots or motion pictures without permission, has become a problem globally because of improvements in technology and the recognition of social media, with many governments legislating against it. Singapore’s parliament surpassed a bill Monday that made distributing or threatening to distribute intimate images a crime, punishable as much as five years in jail, similarly to quality and caning. “Intimate images may want to become widely shared and on platforms, and it can be not possible to absolutely do away with.
They have the ability to motive exceptional damage to the sufferer,” stated K. Shanmugam, Law and Home affairs minister. “Cyber-flashing” can be punishable up to a year in prison or a best. If the recipient is younger than 14, it’s far punishable up to 2 years in jail, a quality or caning. The modifications are a part of a major overhaul of Singapore’s penal code. Other new measures encompass outlawing marital rape, banning child sex dolls, and decriminalizing suicide.
COMMENT
Singapore’s nearly 150-year-old penal code turned into inherited from colonial ruler Britain and become ultimate fully reviewed in 2007. Cyber Law changed into published in September 2007, quickly after our press commenced publishing books. It is a fantastic instance of how computer publishing, print-on-demand distribution, and press work. Though we’ve better our operations over the past 2 years, our center model is essentially unchanged. We are green, and our enterprise model has little overhead. A publishing crew, separated geographically, worked online to post Cyber Law. The creator in Iowa worked with the e-book’s editor, Kyle Torke, who lives in Colorado.
The final record changed into then sent to me, the writer, in New York, and I formatted it right into an ebook using only Microsoft Word. I then despatched the document to our artist in Liverpool, England, Chris Taylor, to design the cover with the assist of the duvet photo supplied using some other artist. I then created the very last files by converting the MS Word documents to PDF using a Web application fee of about $13.
Finally, I installed the title (with the statistics that may be considered at Amazon.Com or associated stores) at our printer, Lightning Source. I uploaded 4 PDF files: cover, back cowl, backbone, and interior. It took me about 1 hour to do the technical issue of offering the files to the printer. Cyber Law is one of our best-promoting titles, and income grows steadily every month. As a publisher, I bear in mind the income growth of Cyber Law to be a trademark of how the income of a book can develop and the increase of our press, usual.
I am faced with an apparently unanswerable query with every book I put up: what makes a super book? And what defines an exceptional book in the first region? Perhaps the truth that I ask this query on every occasion drives the press I run in the first area. To complicate in addition, the answer or answers to this question are changing because publishing itself is changing.
This reality has a dramatic impact on positive players inside the industry, whilst lots of those players choose to ignore or avoid the reality that no longer handiest is publishing changing; however, the solution to my question above is converting, too. In other words, the values held by way of a previous generation aren’t my values as a “21st-century writer,” often running online, neither is what makes an e-book remarkable the same.
For instance, Cyber Law obtained extraordinary evaluations, inclusive of: “This ebook is a quick study and serves as a creation to the basic troubles involved in Internet marketing. Cyber Law’s information offers precious clues…” –Martha L. Cecil-Few, The Colorado Lawyer. And Cyber Law was reviewed by a noted era professional, and it’s far available in the New York Public Library. For me, that (and there are greater top-notch evaluations of Cyber Law) is a stable set of critiques that brings extraordinary credit scores no longer handiest to this e-book but my press.
And this is the way it goes for every single one in all our titles-though a number of our titles have more opinions than others. But, for an older individual now not conversant in the Internet or era and who grew up studying the New York Times Book Review, the above reviews (or the effect of their marketing) imply nothing-certainly due to the fact Cyber Law was not reviewed by way of the New York Times Book Review or perhaps a handful of different esoteric, instructional resources (lots of which might be dying or lifeless, including the Los Angeles Times ebook evaluate phase).
Therefore, this potential marketplace percentage of clients may not buy an ebook that has now not been blessed through their resources-which include Cyber Law (even being in the NY Public Library isn’t enough). This lack of “legit sanction” within the publishing international has different results, such as making media attention in trendy hard to attract, among other things. And there are many other examples of ways publishing of the past is clashing with the present, even down very petty things consisting of how older, unbiased bookstores will open a print-on-demand book to the again cover, observe the placement of a bar code, and refuse to appearance any in addition on the ebook based totally on that truth by myself.
All of these biases (and there are numerous more) of the “vintage shield” are the equivalent of dismissing actually tens of millions of writers who paintings online and their books, and excluding an entire generation-if, not generations-from get entry to to the enterprise of publishing and efficaciously advertising and marketing books in a worthwhile way. It is a shape of sophistication war and financial prejudice. Even racial discrimination or nationalism may be applied to this “old defend” of publishing, who no less than would be adamantly adversarial (usually politically) to unfastened alternate, which drives World Audience’s business version. Old-faculty publishing thrives on unions, for instance, which might be useless online.
