This inquiry, run through Australia’s Productivity Commission, was extremely broad but included a number of extreme danger signals in its mentioning of US-style ‘fair use’ and the possibility of further broadening exceptions and limitations, and in its questioning whether copyright is a hindrance to innovation.

In consultation with Australian and international stakeholders, the IPA decided to give the Productivity Commission examples of the innovation and investment publishers undertake to consistently remain ahead of the curve, especially in the digital space. Read the whole submission here. We thank those members who responded to our call for such examples. In the end, we could not include all of your material, but we very much appreciate your speedy and detailed responses.

The rest of our submission includes a critique of the problems inherent in the US-style ‘fair use’ law and the severe problems that would arise if such a law were transposed holus-bolus onto the very different Australian legal framework. Finally we referred to the PwC report into Canadian publishing to warn of the disastrous results that broader exceptions have meant for Canadian education publishing.