Australia's copyright laws would be dramatically simplified, the collecting agency placed on probation, and small copyright owners given a forum in which to take on big corporations under a series of sweeping recommendations to be tabled by the government on Tuesday.
The Productivity Commission's final report on intellectual property, delivered after a 12-month inquiry, finds that Australian rules that permit the use of copyrighted works only in specific circumstances should be replaced with a broader, US-style "fair use" provision. This allows the use of extracts from copyrighted books, music and videos in circumstances that are fair.
More National News Videos
The case for copyright reform
Peter Martin explains why Australia's copyright laws are putting it at a competitive disadvantage.
The inquiry was told that under the existing law, Australian firms would have been unable to develop new technologies, such as Google Translate or Google Image Search because it prohibits uses that haven't been specifically allowed.
It took until 2006 for the law to be changed to allow the use of video cassette recorders, by which time they were on the way out. The law still has not been fully updated for DVDs, memory sticks or cloud storage.
Israel adopted fair use in 2007, in part to create a culture of innovation.
Schools told the commission they were paying millions of dollars to do things they could do without charge in the United States, such as displaying publicly available websites and including thumbnail photographs of the covers of library books in course notes.
Universities Australia said its members were unable to properly compete with overseas suppliers in online education because they had to spend between 1250 and 1740 hours per course obtaining copyright permissions that weren't needed in the United States.
A cost benefit analysis by Ernst & Young, to be released with the report, finds big benefits from switching to fair use, in contrast to a study funded by the Copyright Agency that the commission describes as "methodologically flawed".
![The Productivity Commission believes Australian rules that permit the use of copyrighted works only in specific ...](/web/20170114175830im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/1/1/w/2/o/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gte3q7.png/1482207803425.jpg)
The commission finds it is impossible to determine how the agency handles the $140 million it collects from schools and other institutions, and recommends that it be subject to a governance review by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, followed by ongoing monitoring. The officially-sanctioned collection agency is chaired by former News Corporation chief executive Kim Williams and, according to its annual report, pays three of its staff in excess of $250,000.
Ministers Greg Hunt and Mitch Fifield will allow only a short time for consultation on the report's recommendations before preparing legislation in the first half of next year.
The commission also recommends the establishment of a low-cost, British-style Intellectual Property Enterprise Court to quickly settle disputes by limiting costs and the time spent in court. It would allow small copyright and patent owners to bring actions against big firms for stealing their work without facing prohibitive legal costs.
It recommends the government extend to universities, schools and libraries the so-called "safe harbour" provisions that protect internet service providers from liability for copyright infringements by their users. As expected, it recommends that the market for books be completely opened up to competition from overseas as happened to the market for recorded music in the 1990s.
While it notes that international treaties prevent Australia from cutting the length of copyright terms, it says there would be merit in cutting the term for which copyright is owned by publishers, requiring it to revert to the original authors a few decades after publication.
15 comments
Comment are now closed