LawFont.com

The budget of DFAT has been slashed, according to this Australian report I found when catching up on some blog reading today. As Roggeveen in the Lowy Interpreter notes – cuts to overseas posts will hurt Australian interests. It seems strange to see this from a PM who is a former diplomat himself.

Why am I commenting on this? Not really legal, I know. But I was strongly reminded, by this story, of an email I got from an old friend of mine a while back. She’s a professional who moved overseas. Energetic. Interesting. Intelligent. With her permission, I reproduce the email (with country names blanked to protect the innocent!) over the fold. No assertions by me, or Roggeveen, can quite capture what these kinds of cuts mean like her story of trying to get more involved with the Australian embassy in another country. (more…)

Michael Geist, the IPKat, Bill Patry and no doubt others note that the UK IP Office has issued a consultation paper on ‘Taking Forward the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property: Proposed Changes to Copyright Exceptions‘. At a cool 90 pages, it’s a big document; it’s also a very detailed one, covering potential broadened copyright exceptions for private copying (format shifting), educational uses, private research and study, libraries and archives (for preservation), and parody. Interested parties have until 8 April 2008 to respond.

From an Australian perspective, having in the last couple of years gone through something fairly similar, I think one of the most interesting things about the consultation paper is a point picked up by Patry: the ‘recognition of the conflicting needs for clear guidelines so that people can know what they may do and what they may not, and the countervailing ad hoc nature of so many determinations’. In other words, the old ‘rules/standards’ or ‘flexibility/certainty’ debate. (more…)