The House of Commons

Cheque’s finally in the mail for (some) artists

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:50:00 +0000

The recently released Federal Budget held at least one item of interest for the nation’s starving artists: a planned $1.5 million to be spent on establishing a resale royalty scheme. Such a scheme has long been advocated for (by Matthew Rimmer and the Arts Law Centre, amongst many others), in order to bring Australia into line with other jurisdictions including those in Europe, and North and Latin America.

The move to ensure that visual artists benefit from appreciation in the value of their works has been seen as particularly significant for Indigenous artists. Considering the current market for Australian Indigenous artists’ works, a right to resale royalties would translate to a not-insubstantial extra income for some better-known, sought-after artists.

The interesting part will be watching how the scheme develops – at the moment, tenders to administer the scheme should be sought in the later part of this year. For example, nothing appears to have been decided about the term that the right will operate for – that is, whether it will operate on the basis of life + 70 years, or how payments to estates of deceased artists might be managed.

At the same time as K-Rudd gives, however, he also taketh away.

Funding for some other arts sectors has, of course, been slashed – for example, the regional arts fund. So, if you’re an incredibly talented, established (and probably, quite old) artist, whose work has had the benefits of time and hype to appreciate (and which actually sells)– lucky you. That royalty cheque may be in the mail sooner than you thought.

For all those struggling unknowns out there, well, there’s every chance that the program you were relying on for a kick start may be pulled.

Looks like that starving artist cliché will be around (and pulling you a beer) for a while yet.

Tune out, Rock on

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:28:00 +0000

The music industry is once again raising its shrill voice against ‘piracy’, running a campaign featuring a video starring well-known Australian musos. Artists including members of Silverchair, the Veronicas, and Jimmy Barnes discuss the ins and outs of being a musician, under the tag line: “just paying the rent", "not living like a rock star".

Musos who might actually be having difficulty paying their rent were notably absent from the credits – presumably they couldn’t get someone else to fill in for them down at the café that day, or were too busy uploading their latest single onto Trig.

Unsurprisingly, the campaign has become controversial, inciting much media commentary (check some out here, and here) and raising the ire of Frenzal Rhomb guitarist Lindsay McDougall. McDougall originally appeared in the video, and now says it was on false pretences. According to Crikey, he was

“furious at being ‘lumped in with this witch hunt’ and that he had been ‘completely taken out of context and defamed’ by the Australian music industry, which funded the video. He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.” (Crikey)

The original clip including his input has been removed, but is archived.

And what would a debate involving artists’ rights be without a manifesto? ‘Tune out’ has obligingly penned one in response to the In Tune campaign.

Perhaps in an effort to appear marginally down-with-the-kids, the industry campaign page has this pseudo-licence, below, in its footer. It is in some ways similar to a ‘Free for Education’- style licence, and/or may invite the false expectation that they support a sort of personal "fair use" model in some circumstances:

“In Tune was produced with the support of the Australian music industry.
In Tune can be used for personal use and as a free non-commercial
educational resource. For more info, email: intunedoco@gmail.com"

So, there you have it – the kid drummer from Operator Please thinks MySpace is pretty cool, Lindsay McDougall continues to stick it to the Man, and the Veronicas look flawless even when they’re concerned and slightly annoyed.

Thank goodness for free (for educational purposes only) online videos.

Get a list of all (indexable) URLs on a site from the Wayback Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:13:00 +0000

Earlier this year I complained about the problem with search engines. Today, Alexander Osborne (from the National Library of Australia) corrected me, at least a little bit.

I said I'd like to see an interface that (among other nice-to-haves) answers questions like "give me everything you've got from cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip", and it turns out that that's actually possible with The Wayback Machine. Not in a single request, that I know of, but with this (simple old HTTP) request: http://web.archive.org/web/*xm_/www.cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/*, you can get a list of all URLs under cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip, and then if were to want to you could do a n o t h e r H T T P r e q u e s t f o r e a c h U R L.

Pretty cool actually, thanks Alex.

Now I wonder how big you can scale those requests up to... I wonder what happens if you ask for www.*? Or (what the heck, someone has to say it) just '*'. I guess you'd probably break the Internet...

Quantifying open software using Google Code Search

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Google Code Search lets you search for source code files by licence type, so of course I was interested in whether this could be used for quantifying indexable source code on the web. And luckily GCS lets you search for all works with a given licence. (If you don't understand why that's a big deal, try doing a search for all Creative Commons licensed work using Google Search.) Even better, using the regex facility you can search for all works! You sure as heck can't do that with a regular Google web search.

Okay, so here's the latest results, including hyperlinks to searches for you to try them yourself:

all (by regex: .*) : 36,700,000
gpl : 8,960,000
lgpl : 4,640,000
bsd : 3,110,000
mit : 903,000
cpl : 136,000
artistic : 192
apache : 156
disclaimer : 130
python : 108
zope : 103
mozilla : 94
qpl : 86
ibm : 67
sleepycat : 51
apple : 47
lucent : 19
nasa : 15
alladin : 9

And here's a spreadsheet with graph included: However, note the discontinuity (in absolute and trend terms) between approximate and specific results in that (logarithmic) graph, which suggests Google's approximations are not very good.

CAL Wants YOU!....To distribute any funds that it owes you

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:24:00 +0000

Trawling the web in search of copyright knowledge, as one does from time to time, I came across an interesting post on the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) site. CAL collects funds under the statutory licence scheme that is provided in the Australian Copyright Act and, according to its website, there are a number of corporations and individuals who are missing out on their moolah. Could you be one of them? Head here to find out.

Sadly this blogger is not in the money, but there are some interesting names on the lists. Some make perfect sense - for example, Australian artist Pro Hart. Then there are the numerous estates who are owed money, including the estate of Ernest Hemingway, AA Milne, and Australian architect Harry Seidler. Then there are the more unusual 'publishers' -for example, eBay Australia & New Zealand and Air Caledonie International. I'm not sure what Air Caledonie has published or who's reproduced it, but I want to go to New Caledonia after visiting that website.

CAL v NSW in the High Court

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:21:00 +0000

Regular readers will know of my interest in all-things-Crown-copyright, so I have come out of my blogging hiatus* to let you all know that last week argument in the appeal of Copyright Agency Limited v State of New South Wales was heard before five members of the High Court (Gleeson CJ, Gummow, Heydon, Crennan, and Kiefel JJ). As you may recall, this case considers whether the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) can collect money from the NSW Government for the use of certain copyright-protected surveyor plans. The Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia found that CAL could not collect on these plans on the basis an implied licence exists, permitting the NSW Government to do everything it needs to in relation to the plans, as dictated by statute.

A transcript for the hearing can be found on AustLII here. I will get some comments up within the next week.

* Self-imposed in a desperate attempt to actually write my thesis, and I am pleased to report that it's going well, in case my supervisors are reading this.

Table comparing Yahoo and Google's commons-based advanced search options

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:15:00 +0000

Hi commons researchers,

I just did this analysis of Google's and Yahoo's capacities for search for commons (mostly Creative Commons because that's in their advanced search interfaces), and thought I'd share. Basically it's an update of my research from Finding and Quantifying Australia's Online Commons. I hope it's all pretty self-explanatory. Please ask questions. And of course point out flaws in my methods or examples.

Also, I just have to emphasise the "No" in Yahoo's column in row 1: yes, I am in fact saying that the only jurisdiction of licences that Yahoo recognises is the US/unported licences, and that they are in fact ignoring the vast majority of Creative Commons licences. (That leads on to a whole other conversation about quantification, but I'll leave that for now.)

(I've formatted this table in Courier New so it should come out well-aligned, but who knows).

Feature                       | Google | Yahoo |
------------------------------+--------+-------+
1. Multiple CC jurisdictions  | Yes    | No    | (e.g.)
2. 'link:' query element      | No     | Yes   | (e.g. G, Y)
3. RDF-based CC search        | Yes    | No    | (e.g.)
4. meta name="dc:rights" *    | Yes    | ? **  | (e.g.)
5. link-based CC search       | No     | Yes   | (e.g.)
6. Media-specific search      | No     | No    | (G, Y)
7. Shows licence elements     | No     | No    | ****
8. CC public domain stamp *** | Yes    | Yes   | (e.g.)
9. CC-(L)GPL stamp            | No     | No    | (e.g.)

* I can't rule out Google's result here actually being from <a rel="license"> in the links to the license (as described here: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license).
** I don't know of any pages that have <meta name="dc:rights"> metadata (or <a rel="licence"> metadata?) but don't have links to licences.
*** Insofar as the appropriate metadata is present.
**** (i.e. doesn't show which result uses which licence)

Notes about example pages (from rows 1, 3-5, 8-9):

To determine whether a search engine can find a given page, first look at the page and find enough snippets of content that you can create a query that definitely returns that page, and test that query to make sure the search engine can find it (e.g. '"clinton lies again" digg' for row 8). Then do the same search as an advanced search with Creative Commons search turned on and see if the result is still found.
The example pages should all be specific with respect to the feature they exemplify. E.g. the Phylocom example from row 9 has all the right links, logos and metadata for the CC-GPL, and particularly does not have any other Creative Commons licence present, and does not show up in search results.

I think I found a trump card (update: no, I didn't)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:46:00 +0000

(following on from this post)

http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/intended_users.php

I'll certainly be looking into this further.

(update: On further investigation, it doesn't look so good. http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/researcher.php says:

We are in the process of redesigning our researcher web interface. During this time we regret that we will not be able to process any new researcher requests. Please see if existing tools such as the Wayback Machine can accommodate your needs. Otherwise, check back with us in 3 months for an update.

This seems understandable except for this, on the same page:

This material has been retained for reference and was current information as of late 2002.

That's over 5 years. And in Internet time, that seems like a lifetime. I'll keep investigating.)

Reminder: Review of Private Copying Exceptions

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:28:00 +0000

The Government is conducting a review of the recently introduced format shifting exceptions in the Copyright Act (47J and 110AA). The review is required by the Copyright Amendment Act 2006. The Attorney-General's Department has released an issues paper inviting submissions on the operation of these provisions. More information is available here.

Submissions are due just around the corner (29 February) - so get submitting!

Copyright Enforcement, UK Style

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:38:00 +0000

Earlier in the week SMH reported that the Government is considering forcing ISPs to disconnect users who access pirated material (three strikes and you're out, UK style).

Kim Weatherall has done an excellent overview of the problems with this approach.

The problem with search engines

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:53:00 +0000

There is a problem with search engines at the moment. Not any one in particular - I'm not saying Google has a problem. Google seems to be doing what they do really well. Actually, the problem is not so much something that is being done wrong, but something that is just not being done. Now, if you'll bear with me for a moment...

The very basics of web search

Web search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Live, etc., are made up of a few technologies:

Web crawling - downloading web pages; discovering new web pages
Indexing - like the index in a book: figure out which pages have which features (meaning keywords, though there may be others), and store them in separate lists for later access
Performing searches - when someone wants to do a keyword search, for example, the search engine can look up the keywords in the index, and find out which pages are relevant

None of these is trivial. I'm no expert, but I suggest indexing is the easiest. Performing searches well is what made Google so successful, where previous search engines had been treating the search step more trivially.

But what I'm interested in here is web crawling. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that online commons quantification doesn't require indexing or performing searches. But bear with me - I think it's more than that.

A bit more about the web crawler

There are lots of tricky technical issues about how to do the best crawl - to cover as many pages as possible, to have the most relevant pages possible, to maintain the latest version of the pages. But I'm not worried about this now. I'm just talking about the fundamental problem of downloading web pages for later use.

Anyone who is reading this and hasn't thought about the insides of search engines before is probably wondering at the sheer amount of downloading of web pages required, and storing them. And you should be.

They're all downloading the same data

So a single search engine basically has to download the whole web? Well, some certainly have to try. Google, Yahoo and Live are trying. I don't know how many others are trying, and many of them may not be publicly using their data so we may not see them. There clearly are more at least than I've ever heard of - take a look at Wikipedia's robots.txt file: http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt.

My point is why does everyone have to download the same data? Why isn't there some open crawler somewhere that's doing it all for everyone, and then presenting that data through some simple interface? I have a personal belief that when someone says 'should', you should* be critical in listening to them. I'm not saying here that Google should give away their data - it would have to be worth $millions to them. I'm not saying anyone else should be giving away all their data. But I am saying that there should be someone doing this, from an economic point of view - everyone is downloading the same data, and there's a cost to doing that, and the cost would be smaller if they could get together and share their data.

Here's what I'd like to see specifically:

A good web crawler, crawling the web and thus keeping an up-to-date cache of the best parts of the web
An interface that lets you download this data, or diffs from a previous time
An interface that lets you download just some. E.g. "give me everything you've got from cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip" or "give me everything you've got from *.au (Australian registered domains)" or even "give me everything you've got that links to http://labs.creativecommons.org/licenses/zero-assert/1.0/us/"
Note that in these 'interface' points, I'm talking about downloading data in some raw format, that you can then use to, say, index and search with your own search engine.

If you know somewhere this is happening, let me know, because I can't find it. I think the Wayback Machine is the closest to an open access Web cache, and http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/ is the closest I've found to generalised access to the Wayback Machine. I'll read more about it, and let you know if it comes up trumps.

* I know.

Creative Commons has data!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:20:00 +0000

As you aren't aware*, Creative Commons has some data on the quantification of Creative Commons licence usage (collected using search engine queries). It's great that they are a) collecting this data, and b) sharing it freely.

If you look around, you can probably find some graphs based on this data, and that's probably interesting in itself. Tomorrow I'll see about dusting off my Perl skills, and hopefully come up with a graph of the growth of Australian CC licence usage. Stay tuned.

* If you knew about this, why didn't you tell me!

CC0 - Creative Commons' new solution for the public domain

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:10:00 +0000

Creative Commons have come up with a better way for people to mark works as copyright-free, or part of the public domain. It's called CC0 (CC Zero). The page for using it is here: http://labs.creativecommons.org/license/zero.

There are two options here. The first is a waiver, where you can "waive all copyrights and related or neighboring interests that you have over a work". The second is an assertion, where you can "assert that a work is free of copyright as a matter of fact, for example, because the work is old enough to be in the public domain, or because the work is in a class not protected by copyright such as U.S. government works."

It's pretty neat. I've thought the idea of asserting a work's copyright status, as a matter of fact, was a good idea, and not just limited to the public domain, but also for other classes of usage rights.

Okay, so that's basically the CC0 story. I've tried it out with a trivial web page I think I would otherwise have copyright in - the result is at the bottom of this post. But I must say I'm slightly disappointed in the lack of embedded metadata. Where's the RDF? As I've talked about before, when you do things with RDF, you allow sufficiently cool search engines to understand your new technology (or licence) simply by seeing it, without first having to be told about it.

Here's my example waiver:

To the extent possible under law,
Ben Bildstein has waived all copyright, moral rights, database rights, and any other rights that might be asserted over Sensei's Library: Bildstein/Votes.

'Ideas' Now Free

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:34:00 +0000

Lawrence Lessig's seminal work The Future of Ideas has now been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence and can be freely downloaded off the Internet. Read more on Lessig's blog here or download the book here.

This completes what I will describe as Lessig's trilogy in four parts: all four of his books (Code and Other Laws of Cybersapce, Code v 2.0, The Future of Ideas and Free Culture) are now available under various Creative Commons licences.

It Wouldn't be Christmas Without....

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:22:00 +0000

In 2006, the (sadly, soon to be ex-) Senator Andrew Bartlett helped us identify a new species of creature, one borne out of the Copyright Act amendments, known affectionately as "the Congealed, Wobbling Blob of Copyright" (see here and here).

In 2007, it appears the Blob has moved with the times and now has its own 'BlobBook' page, and sends its silly season good wishes:

Seasons Greetings from all of us at the House of Commons!

The Harry Potter Lexicon - Fair Use?

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 02:14:00 +0000

The Fair Use Project at the Centre for Internet and Society (Stanford Law School) will help defend a book publisher planning on releasing a print version of the The Harry Potter Lexicon. Publication of the book has been blocked by JK Rowling and Warner Brothers based on claims of copyright and trademark infringement. Rowling notes:

"It is not reasonable, or legal, for anybody, fan or otherwise, to take an author's hard work, re-organize their characters and plots, and sell them for their own commercial gain. However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

Rowling previously shared quite a close relationship with the Lexicon and has publicly praised the website. (Read more in this post on Ars Technica).

According to SMH:

"Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone said the Lexicon is protected by US rules that have long given people 'the right to create reference guides that discuss literary works, comment on them and make them more accessible.'"

"The Proposed OO XML ISO Standard and Australia" Symposium

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:41:00 +0000

The Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre will be hosting a symposium on the proposed OO XML ISO standard and Australia. The event is free and we hope to see you there!

Speakers: A range of technical, legal and content experts from Australia and the region
Date: Friday 14 December 2007
Time: 8:30-1:00 (technical), 2:00-4:30 (legal) (catering provided)
Venue: Room 101, level 1, new Law Building, UNSW lower campus
URL: http://www.cyberlawcentre.org/2007/ooxml/

This symposium to explore issues raised by the proposed OOXML (Microsoft Office Open XML) document format standard from Microsoft, to assist consideration of the Australian response to the proposal through Standards Australia. Expert commentators from a range of perspectives will present written and oral summaries of the issues, and there will be detailed discussion of the most significant of these. There is proposed informal participation from Standards Australia, and experts associated with them. There are two sessions, Technical and Legal; there will be a preliminary 'Background Paper' on the Legal area, and a list of 'top 10 topics' for the Technical. The web page will also be updated with more detail and further resources close to the day.

Entry for this OOXML Symposium is free, but places are limited. To reserve a place, it is essential to RSVP to feedback@cyberlawcentre.org, indicating if you are coming for AM, PM or both sessions, if you need lunch, and the nature of your interest in the proposed standard.

What You Need To Know Now About IP Right Now

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day to analyse the Australian public domain and keep you, our loyal readers, informed about all the developments in Australian IP policy and scholarship. This is particularly the last case over the last week when Australia has just had a Federal election that has brought about a complete change of government. So, without further adieu, here is a list of resources and developments that you might be interested in:

The launch of Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand licences - see more on the CC-ANZ website here and CC-AU Jessica Coates's blogpost about the launch here.

The launch of "Legal Aspects of Web 2.0 Activities: Management of Legal Risk Associated with Use of YouTube, MySpace and Second Life", a report written by QUT researchers Jessica Coates, Nic Suzor and Dr Anne Fitzgerald. The report can be accessed here and more information found on the CC-AU website here. The report considers generals issues created by these social networking sites but also specific issues created in each case.
As per my earlier post on this case, the High Court has granted special leave to appeal in the case of Copyright Agency Limited v State of New South Wales (see it confirmed on the HCA website here and at AustLII here.) The appeal is concerned with the issue of the implied licence considered by in the Federal Court decision.

Expect more updates over the next few days.

Simpsons Movie Uploader Fined

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 02:46:00 +0000

This just in: Jose Duarte, who filmed The Simpsons Movie on his mobile phone and uploaded it onto the Internet, has been convicted and fined $1000 by Magistrate Pat O'Shane at the Downing Centre Local Court (See Housemate Abi's previous post on the case here). According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Duarte's lawyer argued that his client "had 'the sophistication of a dead fish', when it came to uploading the footage on to the internet." Indeed. Commonwealth lawyers argued, however, that "the potential costs for the film's owners was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars".

It doesn't appear that anything detailed, beyond the report in the Sydney Morning Herald, is up on the Internet about this case yet. More to come as more details emerge.

Review into Access of UK National Archives

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:59:00 +0000

This is one for any international readers...or, more, specifically, UK readers. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced that a review will be conducted into the United Kingdom National Archives. The review will consider the appropriateness of the time when records become available (this is 30 years after 'an event', which is the same here in Australia) and whether this period should be decreased. More can be found at the National Archives news page here.

Archival research is sometimes overlooked in scholarship, but it's clear that there is a wealth of information in these vaults (I personally imagine them to look something like the Hall of Prophecies from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, although with books in place of orbs). I've been spending a lot of time on archival websites lately - the National Archives of Australia has a fantastic feature called RecordSearch that allows you to find archival documents and narrow down your search. The UK National Archives also has an excellent website - I started off planning to research Crown copyright in the UK and ended up reading perhaps a bit more than I should have about records concerning Jack the Ripper. Not for the faint-hearted researcher. Archival research is therefore a bit like spending a few hours of Wikipedia: you end up far, far away from where you started.

Benedict Atkinson's new book The True History of Copyright (review coming!) contains a lot of archival research and my own work will include this type of research. It's interesting that even though we have truly entered the age of 'digital copyright' there is still so much that we can learn from materials about history and policy from 100 years ago. Accessing and considering these types of materials can broaden both discussions about issues and the commons as well: yet another way for dwarves to stand on the shoulders of giants!

This Is What It Sounds Like When Doves Cry?

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:55:00 +0000

There's a new song out on the airwaves by UK electro-pop act Groove Armada where a girl, after breaking up with her boyfriend, is out driving and sings that she's got "Prince singing hot things at me, I know every line." (The song is "Song 4 Mutya") However, Prince fans may find themselves singing a different tune soon.

According to a report in today's online Sydney Morning Herald, Prince "has threatened to sue thousands of his biggest fans for breach of copyright, provoking an angry backlash and claims of censorship." (See the report here) Targeted items include photos, CD covers and lyrics (our title is clearly for the purposes of parody and satire, just so we're clear). This follows the singer's decision last year to hire an Internet company to seek the removal of 2000 videos featuring his songs from YouTube, including one of a baby dancing to his track Let's Go Crazy (obviously inspired by the Dancing Baby from Ally McBeal, I'm sure). However, it's also noted that Prince has done a few things in recent years with the aim of removing the middleman and bringing himself closer to fans, including distributing his CDs with newspapers. So it seems the digital revolution is still causing major problems in the music industry.

Author's Note: This is a bit of a different post - just about copyright and not so much about the commons! We apologise for our lack of posting lately and regular non-Prince related posts will appear soon!

Consumer Voices in IP

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:22:00 +0000

On Monday Housemate Abi and I attended the "Increasing Consumers Voice in Intellectual Property Policy" Consumers International World Congress Side Event at the Vibe Hotel in North Sydney (see Abi's previous post with the details here.) Speakers were there from all parts of the globe, including the United Kingdom, Thailand, Chile, Indonesia and the Netherlands. You can read more about the day here at the CHOICE Voice blog on the World Congress and there are links to many of the Powerpoint presentations delivered on the day.

The presentations were fascinating - when I think about consumer issues in intellectual property law, my mind instantly jumps to whether we can legally use our digital technologies in the ways that we want to - but the many issues covered at this event served as a reminder that intellectual property laws affect consumers in very different ways around the world.

Two particular presentations stand out in my mind as illustrative of this. First, Dr. Jiraporn Limpananont from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), delivered an excellent presentation on access to medicines and campaigning against drug patents in Thailand. The public were incredibly involved in these campaigns and Dr. Limpananont's presentation features photographs of the many community demonstrations aimed at reforming this system. (See the presentation here).

Second, Indrani Thuraisingham from the Kuala Lumpur branch of Consumers International discussed the issues of DRM in academic journals. CIKL purchased a number of academic journal articles and ebooks online and studied the access, use and download restrictions that came with each, with very interesting - and startling - results. With the average price of an article being $US25, this equated to:

0.69% of the monthly income of a US citizen
41.67% of the monthly income of an individual in India

75.95% of the monthly income of an individual in Cambodia

(From Ms. Thuraisingham's slide show, available here)

Take a look at the presentations available on the CHOICE Voice site - many of the presentations contain similarly startling statistics, with the overall theme being that there needs to be a definite increase in consumer voices in intellectual property. Those with a voice that can be heard need to speak up!

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:28:00 +0000

Ben Atkinson, formerly of the NSW Attorney General's Department, has a new book to be released in November, titled 'The True History of Copyright: The Australian Experience 1905-2005'. The Sydney University Press site on the book states that "The purpose of this book is to examine the historical record - concentrating on the development of copyright law in Australia - to determine the truth of modern assumptions about the origins and function of copyright law." I'll post a book review after it becomes available.

There aren't many books focusing on the history of Australian copyright, so this book will be a welcome addition to the literature. 2007 is shaping up to be a very good year for copyright scholarship, both in Australia and internationally.

Details: Benedict Atkinson, "The True History of Copyright: The Australian Experience 1905-2005", 2007, Sydney University Press, ISBN: 9781920898458. Introduction by Brian Fitzgerald. Find out more and pre-order here.

Australian Elections 2.0?

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:05:00 +0000

The Australian public is going to the polls on 24th November to elect members of our Federal Parliament (the one that sits in Canberra, is currently led by John Howard, and is constantly under siege from members of The Chaser's War on Everything). The calling of the election was a long time coming. Even though we knew that an election would have to take place soon (so says the Constitution), Prime Minister John Howard took his time in announcing the exact date. But now, in the words of one Federal House of Representatives candidate, it's "game on". A normal part of an election process, particularly at such a high level of government, is the holding of debates between party leaders. In Australia, debate is already under way as to who, when, and how these debates should take place.

House of Commons friend and ANU academic Dr. Matthew Rimmer has called for Australia to follow the lead of US Democrats presidential candidate hopeful Barack Obama and allow these debates to be made "freely accessible across all media and technology platforms" (See the ANU Press Release here). In the United States, Obama suggested that the US Democrat debates be either placed in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

Dr Rimmer has said that

"Whichever television networks or internet media end up broadcasting the federal
election debates, it’s important to the health of our democracy that people are
free to capture and distribute the dialogue of our prospective leaders so that
they can make a more informed decision."

The House of Commons strongly supports Dr. Rimmer's suggestion. It is an unusual one in an Australian context - in the United States, there is no copyright in works produced by the US government and thus there is at least a precedent for this type of action. There is also the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, which arguably means that this type of content gains even greater significance. However, there has been a shift in this campaign to Australian political parties embracing all that the digital revolution has to offer (just type 'Kevin07' into Google, for example). A pledge by the parties to make debate materials freely available and accessible via sites such as YouTube would be both a positive and definite step for Australian democracy in the digital age.

The logisitics of such a proposition has also caused much discussion amongst House of Commons housemates. Housemate Ben writes:

"I think election debates should belong to the commons, at least insofar as
complete reproduction is concerned. However, I do see that there are good
reasons not to allow modifications, because they could be used to spread
disinformation at such a crucial time. For these reasons, a licence such as
Creative Commons No Derivatives would be appropriate (as opposed to, say, a
public domain dedication). It's also worth noting that, even under such a
licence, derivatives could be made for the purpose of satire (correct me if I'm
wrong here!), and that could perhaps be both a good and a bad thing (I'm not
sure to what extent you could use the satire exception to spread
disinformation)."

In response, Housemate Abi has agreed (and I concur) that the parody or satire fair dealing exception in the Copyright Act could probably be used to create parodies, although there issue regarding modifications may need to be addressed.

For more information on Dr. Rimmer's proposal, the ANU Press Release can be found here.

Increasing Consumers Voice in Intellectual Property Policy - A Consumers International World Congress Side Event

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:09:00 +0000

(Via Choice)
9:00am - 5:00pm, October 29, 2007 (North Sydney)

Consumers' rights to use intellectual property are increasingly under threat. Policy is made at an international level - how can national consumer organisations work better to strengthen their voice on the global stage? This interactive one-day forum will introduce current campaigns and brainstorm ideas for action to reassert consumer rights.

Speakers include:

Michelle Childs (Knowledge Ecology International, USA)
Indrani Thuraisingham (CI, Malaysia)
Indah Suksmaningsih - YLKI (Indonesia)
Chris Murray (Consumers Union, USA)
Luis Villaroel Villalon (Ministry of Education, Chile)
Alwin Sixma - (Consumentenbond, The Netherlands).

The full program is available here.

Presented by: Consumers International, Choice, Consumers Union, Consumentenbond, Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD).

Registration in advance is required. General attendance: $65. Students/Academics/Employees of NGOs: $25. Please contact Lizzie Ball (CHOICE) at lball@choice.com.au or +61.2.95773372. Registration fee includes Morning Tea, Lunch and Afternoon Tea

For more information about the Consumers International World Conference 2007 see this page.

The Unlocking IP team will be there. Hope to see you there too!