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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…)

Melbourne University Law School Masters program has changed its subject “Fundamentals of Islamic Law” to “Principles of Islamic Law”. He He He.

Yesterday I noted that DFAT is asking for submissions on whether Australia should join negotiations on plurilateral anti-counterfeiting treaty (known at the moment as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, although I’m not clear why – does putting ‘trade’ in it make it more attractive?).

I was talking to a couple of people yesterday about whether Australia should. Here are my initial thoughts, although they’re by no means fully formed: (more…)

If you are interested in IP you may have noticed, around the traps, references to proposals for a “plurilateral anti-counterfeiting treaty”. The proposal comes out of a small group of countries – Canada, the 27-member state European Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand and Switzerland.

According to an IP Watch story a couple of weeks ago,

negotiations will expand upon the enforcement standards of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and countries would be encouraged to comply with other international IPR agreements. The goal is to set a new, higher benchmark for enforcement that countries can join voluntarily.

Now, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has issued a Discussion Paper on whether Australia should join in negotiations. The discussion paper is available here. Be quick – submissions are due by 3 December. Apparently DFAT are interested in hearing people’s views on:

1. whether Australia should be part of such negotiations;
2. whether international standards do need to be heightened in the area, and/or whether standards in Australia need to be heightened
3. views on the kinds of provisions that should be sought/avoided/etc.

It must be Friday. All the IP stories are sports ones.

Several sites have picked up the story that the Major Baseball League is involved in a rather Major Technology Stuff-up. As Madisonian reports:

‘Apparently fans who purchased digital downloads from MLB have discovered that MLB has changed its DRM scheme. Fans who downloaded complete games from MLB had to log in through an MLB web page to verify that the download in question was being viewed on the appropriate, licensed computer. MLB has now removed this page, making those downloads unviewable. Apparently MLB does not know when the problem will be fixed. This means that those who purchased the downloads have been denied the benefits of their bargain.’

As the US sites are reporting – under US law, the fans are stuffed. Circumventing the DRM is illegal under their Copyright Act (the DMCA). And no one can sell the fans the means to access the games, because that’s illegal too.

Aren’t you proud that Australian law isn’t so silly? Here, under the Copyright Regulations 1969, we actually have a prescribed exception that allows circumvention of an access control to get access to stuff where:

(a) the technological protection measure is not operating normally; and
(b) a replacement technological protection measure is not reasonably available.

yay Australia! oh, but that’s right. STILL no one can sell you (or even provide to you for free, personally) with the means to do so. So GEEKY Australian baseball fans are ok. That must be a large group.

Oh, hang on, no. Geeky Australian baseball fans are not ok, because they might be circumventing under US law if they were to circumvent a US access control based on a US site … might depend on the technology; whether all the acts were occurring in Australia. Hmmm……

My brain hurts.

As Malik reports, we’ve having the “we own all rights to all images of sport for all time” debate again.

This time it’s cricket. Cricket Australia has been in disputes with all kinds of media over its accreditation rules (the rules that you have to follow if you want to be on the ground as a journalist, you know, to take photos and stuff).

As the Brisneyland Courier Mail reported the other day:

CA insists it holds the intellectual property rights to agency photographs taken at its venues, and that those photos cannot be re-sold without its permission. …
Cricket Australia said it was acting to protect the media rights that form its core revenue in a changing media landscape.
“Where cricket generates commercial value, we believe that some of it should be available for investment in the future of cricket,” CA spokesman Peter Young said.”

The SMH reports today that the accreditation stand-off between CA and News Ltd was resolved, but that international wire services Reuters, AP and AFP were still locked out of the Gabba after refusing to pay CA for images from the game.

Let’s think about this for a minute. “Where cricket generates commercial value, we believe that some of it should be available for investment in the future of cricket”. Hmmm. I quite like that reasoning. I guess that means also that where some journalist takes a photo with me in it and publishes it in a newspaper, that a picture of me is generating commercial value, and some of that value should be available for reinvestment in my appearance (then I could hire that personal trainer I’ve always wanted). Hey, and when I speak to journalists to explain stuff, I should get money for that to reinvest in finding out more stuff about IP law. yeah. Great reasoning.

Come on people. If we all sought to be paid for every little iota of commercial value that could be extracted out of everything, the world would grind to a halt.

Obviously, this is a dispute over media rights in sport, and obviously, that’s much bigger business than photos of me will ever be. And we ARE talking about a dispute between one big body (Cricket Australia) and several others (big international media companies). It’s a little silly to feel particularly sorry, in negotiations, for either side.

But sometimes I wish people would really think through the logic of their positions.

A report into Freedom of Information Laws and (media) free speech in Australia, commissioned by the Right to Know Coalition, has been released. Called the Report of the Independent Audit into the State of Free Speech in Australia, you can download it here (beware: big (336 page) pdf).

The media are breathlessly reporting that ‘more than 500 separate legal provisions in 335 different state and federal acts of Parliament are denying Australians access to a vast amount of information they should be able to see’. Numbers aside, I’ll be interested to see what kinds of information are limited, what grounds can be used to limit availability of information, and how the procedures for getting information are set up (are they complicated? simple?).

Obviously, I’ve not read it yet. Maybe more commentary when I have.

The other day I mentioned the government’s Discussion Paper reviewing the Legal Deposit Scheme. Michael Geist has pointed out to me that related debates – in particular about the relationship between legal deposit and TPMs – have occurred in Canada. So, for your further edification:

1. Michael Geist’s column on the issue;
2. The regulations
3. The LAC Guidelines

I have a chapter in a new book. The book is called TV Futures: Digital Television Policy in Australia. Further information, contents and the first chapter are available at the CMCL-Centre for Media and Communications Law, University of Melbourne. You can order the book here. You can also find an abstract of the chapter here.

With no fanfare (and I mean no fanfare: no press release at all; I found out via the Australian Copyright Council website), the Attorney-General’s Department and the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts have issued a Discussion Paper on the Extension of Legal Deposit in Australia to include audio-visual materials and electronic materials.

The submission date is 11 January 2008, and the Discussion Paper is available from both the DCITA and AG’s websites.

The Legal Deposit scheme requires Australian publishers of ‘library material’ (all paper-based publications – books, sheet music, periodicals, pamphlets) to deposit copies of that material with the National Library of Australia. It doesn’t require deposit of films, sound recordings, or other materials in electronic form, including web material or e-books. (although the penalty – all of $100 – for failure to comply isn’t all that scary).

The purpose is to develop a public collection of published material, so as to preserve national heritage and provide access for research purposes. This stuff is actually quite important (particularly for people like me, but also from a policy perspective).

But of course legal deposit does become trickier when you move to electronic materials. Do we want to preserve every website? Really? Even the teenager’s blog? When? (websites change!) Maybe instead we should go for representative samples? If so, how do we judge what is ‘representative’? And how do you make stuff accessible? If it is preserved electronically, should it be made available online? To whom? On what basis? If you are a public institution responsible for this, do you depend on commercial products to continue their commercial way, and try to fill the gaps? What if the commercial publisher stops providing a service? Really, really interesting questions.

For convenience, a full list of the questions in the review is reproduced over the fold. (more…)

Apropos of a recent post, the latest edition of the Internet Law Bulletin, has an article (or perhaps, more accurately, MIPI Press Release) by Sabine Heindl (General Manager, MIPI) on the issue of suing individuals for downloading or uploading music, and MIPI’s efforts to have ISPs engage in ‘notice and disconnection’ activities. It really doesn’t add anything to the material I explored in my last post, although this paragraph highlights a fact well known to people like me or Alex Malik, perhaps less well known to the general population:

‘The Australian music industry is now in a position to notify ISPs of the IP addresses of copyright infringers, namely those making available copyright-protected music for download on their networks.’

Yes, that’s right. They can see you.

The article pushes the same line we’ve seen in the materials highlighted in my previous post: ‘ISPs should disconnect users’ when they are repeat offenders. What the article doesn’t do is answer all those questions that we still have about any such proposal: (more…)

I’ve become more interested in copyright bureaucracies, and patent and trade mark offices: how they operate; how transparent they are; who they are; how powers are divided between them; how they interact; how they characterise their role, their ‘customers’, and their ‘stakeholders’. How we make them accountable for the decisions they make – or how we fail to do so. Regular readers may have noticed this flavour seeping into some of my more recent posts and papers.

Today, my little obsession is the growth of cooperation between Patent Offices around the world. While there’s long been cooperation (Trilateral Cooperation, for example, between the US, Japan and Europe was set up as early as 1983) I’ve been detecting an increase in the number of press releases in this area, and the number of mooted pilots and activities. So, being the obsessive that I am, I thought I’d collect together what’s been going on – at least as published, that I can find – and offer a few thoughts and questions that these developments raise. (more…)

In the spirit of ‘adding links to blogs that readers of this one might be interested in’: a couple of additions:

1. House of Commons: blog by several students at UNSW who are part of the Unlocking IP project. Interested generally in Australian copyright law, technologies of search, content licensing;
2. Malik’s Law: Alex Malik, interested in Australian copyright law, esp as it relates to technology/enforcement;
3. Defending Scoundrels: blog of Dale Clapperton, QUT researcher and Electronic Frontiers Australia driving force.

Enjoy!

I read in the SMH that Premier Iemma is planning to reform the law to allow police to issue on-the-spot fines for minor criminal offences such as shoplifting, offensive language and minor fraud.

Can I just say that I think this is a really interesting, as well as a potentially troubling, development. I’m not aware of other situations in which conduct we might consider ‘truly criminal’, albeit only in a minor way, has been the subject of on the spot fines. And it seems to me that this approach, while having all the attraction of ‘efficiency’ in the allocation of policing forces, runs the serious risk of muddying the civil-criminal waters in undesirable ways. (more…)