Australia, unlike the United States, has no protection of Fair Use rights. The fair use rights in America were earnt through Judicial interpretation, rather than direct legislation. The Australian Copyright Act of 1968 has no relevant sections covering timeshifting of content for personal use, the backing up of purchased content, nor the transferral of content to another format for personal use. The Attorney-General has put out a request for public submissions on fair use and other copyright issues.

Copyright Act 1968

My first run-in with the Copyright Act of 1968 was in 2001 when I was accused of copyright infringement by the Archives Section of the Australian War Memorial (AWM). An image from the Australian Flying Corps (AFC) website was used in another Government publication and attributed to the AFC website.

The Archives Section of the AWM sent an unhappy email to me claiming I had no right to the photograph, or any reproduction of it, as the sole authority remained with the AWM as they had the original. The email was carbon copied to several others. The photograph in question was one of many taken by Frank Hurley as the Australian Imperial Force's (AIF) official photographer.

Consequently the photograph was under Crown copyright, which, by the Copyright Act of 1968 only covers fifty years from the date of creation. It fell out of copyright in 1969 and has been cultural heritage ever since. I sent an email back, quoting the relevant sections of the Copyright Act and didn't hear anything in return. It was some unpleasantness that came from ignorance of copyright, and the perception of ongoing ownership of a creative work.

Request For Public Submissions

The Attorney-General's office is currently asking for public submissions on fair use and copyright exceptions. This has been covered on slashdot in two articles . There is also the potential to write in on other copyright issues such as copyright term limits, which have been expanded under the Berne Treaty and the Australian-American Free trade Agreement. The latter resulting in many amendments to the 1968 Copyright Act including the addition of DMCA like clauses.

The best source of information on intellectual property issues pertaining to Australia can be found on Kim Weatherall's site . Kim has two articles on fair use; The Fair Use Issues Paper - some initial thoughts and A compendium of my posts in the last 12 months on copyright exceptions-related issues .

What is Copyright

Copyright is a government backed monopoly which allows the content creator to the sole source of reproduction of their creative work for a specific period. The content creator also secures the legal authority to be the sole source of derivative works of their copyrighted work. Copyright can also be sold or assigned to others at the copyright creators discretion.

What we know as modern copyright originated with the innovation of the printing press. Replication of a written work became cheap enough that it could be easily copied and distributed by others than the original creator and publisher of the work. It seems the publishers were for the law, and the government backing of a monopoly on distribution and reproduction of creative works. This fits with today's main backers of copyright legislation, who are the content distributors, not the creators.

Conclusion

I haven't decided what I will submit yet, when I do I will post it to South Sea Republic. I am concerned about the increases in copyright term limits, since they are beyond the life of the individual content creator, this is a direct subsidy to distributors of content, not the creators. I am also concerned with the introduction of anti-circumvention laws. Another area which I do not want to see happen in Australia is the moving of copyright infringement from civil dispute to criminal enforcement. Copyright disputes remain between civil entities, they are not the domain of the Australian Federal Police or the Attorney-General.

For the most part copyright has not affected me as a content creator much. I wilfully publish to the world my works, often under creative commons licenses; or other liberal copyright licenses, such as the BSD License, Apache License and LGPL. As a content consumer, and purchaser of content, I am moving more and more away from restrictive content distribution schemes.

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