AUSTRALIA
A draft report by Australia’s Productivity Commission (PC) recommending a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s copyright laws sent shockwaves through the creative industries Down Under, where publishers, authors, printers, literary agents, children’s book writers and booksellers joined forces in opposing the document.
At the root of the objections — shared by the IPA — were recommendations to cut the copyright period to from 15 to 20 years, change IP law provisions opening up creative works to uncompensated ‘fair use’, and lift all restrictions on foreign book imports.
After publishing its draft report, the Productivity Commission had issued a call for submissions, to which the IPA responded on 2 June with a lengthy text, in support of a submission already made by the Australian Publishers Association, an IPA member.
The IPA’s submission put it to the PC that its draft report had reduced the scope of its inquiry to ‘a spurious argument about ‘winners and losers’ in the shifting balance between intellectual property rights owners and users.’
It added that ‘such an ‘us and them’ narrative is a false dichotomy. Starting from this unsupported premise and working with economic data that is incomplete and insufficient, the value of the PC’s Draft Report is questionable.’
It then picked through the report’s flawed findings, starting with the proposal to introduce ‘fair use’ into Australian law. The IPA warned that to do so would stifle investment by introducing legal uncertainty, and ‘transfer economic benefits flowing from creative works from authors and the creative industries over to technology companies, where new uses of copyright works considered by them to be ‘fair use’ will go unrewarded.’
Regarding the proposal to limit copyright to 15-20 years, the IPA submission points out that to do so was unfeasible, and would require the ‘unravelling of decades of diplomatic and intergovernmental negotiations’.
For the full IPA submission, click here.
URUGUAY
When the Uruguayan parliament announced it was considering the introduction of additional exceptions and limitations to the country’s copyright law, which had been proposed by la Federaciòn de Estudiantes Universitarios del Uruguay (FEUU), the IPA wrote to the Minister of Education and Culture, the President of the Parliamentary Education and Culture Commission and the Director of the Copyright Council to urge them not to press ahead.
The letter, submitted in Spanish, expressed the IPA’s ‘concern that overbroad limitations and exceptions will detrimentally impact the market for educational and academic works’, which will ‘discourage both such works being written and produced and investment in innovation in the uses and accessibility of such works in Uruguay.’
The letter then stressed that Uruguay should be aware of its obligations as a signatory to both the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in particular Article 27.2, ‘Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author’ and article 9.2 of the Berne Convention, ‘It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author.’
For the full text of the letter, click here.