Minutes/Alternatives to Copyright Working Group/2015-11-26

Start: 20:30 26/11/2015 AEST

Finish: 22:45 2611/2015 AEST


 * Policy should consider international obligations but not be limited by them.
 * Possibility of a variable copyright term based on medium and commercial viability.
 * General agreement that a life + 70 year term is undesirable.
 * Possibility of degradation of rights over time (eg, owner has exclusive rights for 10 years, then limited rights onward).
 * Alternatives to a limited monopoly:
 * Retain the limited monopoly.
 * Encouragement of diversity in options without prescribing a particular business model.
 * Provide a 'referred income credit' where the public decides investment in creativity (separate policy).
 * Aversion to exclusive licences that require consumers to pay more than a one-off fee (eg, Game of Thrones exclusively on Foxtel).
 * Can be alleviated by parallel importing and lifting geo-blocks.
 * Probably a bad idea to give subjects of a work (eg, people in a photograph) automatic rights over it because such people don't do any work to actually have a right in it.
 * Possibility of using time-limited, exclusive licences rather than total alienation (transfer/assignment) of copyright (eg, from an author to a publisher).
 * Advantage in that the copyright always defaults back to the creator who can re-negotiate its use.
 * Differentiation between someone who creates a work privately and a person who creates a work during employment.
 * Support for fair use.
 * Support for technological neutrality.
 * Support for clarity over copyright ownership in employment and commission contexts.
 * Possibility of a separate regime for software.
 * Next meeting set for 17 December 2015