PDC: Copyright working group

This Working Group (WG) was established by the Policy Development Committee (PDC) on 6 February 2013.

Working group report
This working group was tasked with developing policy to formalize existing party views on copyright reform. The working group was chaired by Mark Gibbons and will present the following policy text to the March 6 PDC meeting.

Recommendation
The Copyright working group recommends the following policies be adopted as a means to implement the PPAU platform.

Preamble
Copyright was introduced on the basis that some limits to free access and distribution of culture could provide an indirect benefit to the community. The original copyright law legislated a 14 year commercial distribution monopoly on creative work, and an optional 14 year renewal, after which the work entered the public domain for good to be used and built on by others. This was seen to balance a temporary curb on the free market with the creation of a stronger incentive to innovate, create and publish culture.

However, this initial balance has gradually been upset due to intensive lobbying by content owners and a succession of extensions in copyright duration. The commercial monopoly on creative work now persists for 70 years after the death of the creator and may often last for a century or more. The creation of perpetual monopolies has led to a fencing off of the public domain to a degree that is actively harmful for the creative community,[1] and which encourages rights holders to rely on previously created content, removing incentives to create new material.

In order to impose increasingly heavy copyright restrictions on the community, content industries have pushed for ever-harsher enforcement. Bills have reached the US Congress which would have granted US copyright holders power to shut down the websites of other businesses anywhere in the world on the basis of an allegation that the website enabled copyright infringement.[2] Draconian punishments and fines for millions of dollars have been imposed in an attempt to 'make an example' of file sharers. Three-strikes and graduated response laws allow copyright owners power to disconnect entire households in a range of countries on the basis of accusations of infringement,[3] and the Australian government has indicated an intention to consider such laws. Such measures violate freedom of expression, association and assembly, which are enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Australian Constitution contains an implied guarantee of freedom of communication in relation to political matters, which the High Court has determined is essential to the proper functioning of Australian democracy. Assembly within Pirate Party Australia is most often held on the internet and is open to participation from the public. Cutting an Australian citizen off from the internet interferes with the right to assembly and political communication and is therefore in violation of the Constitution, High Court determinations and international covenants.

Globally, copyright holders continue to demand still more enforcement measures including compulsory data retention, tougher three-strikes laws, police access to IP records for petty crimes, and kill switches on shared communication channels.[4] Enforcement of modern copyright has become incompatible with fundamental civil liberties, and has led to increasingly routine violations of privacy, fair trial, and free communication. Consumer rights are also being lost as technology becomes increasingly crippled though measures such as Digital Rights Management (DRM). However the ultimate irony and failure of modern copyright law is that even the current level of enforcement has entirely failed to prevent file and culture sharing from growing unchecked.[5] Humans have always shared culture, and current laws represent a vain and pointless attempt to criminalize innate human behaviour.

The long-term viability of copyright must be secured through a re-institution of the original balanced approach. We should no longer be forced into a false choice between copyright enforcement and fundamental rights. Policy also needs to recognize the fact that culture and file sharing do not reduce overall revenue to content creators.[6] While obsolete service providers may lose revenue, new and sustainable models will be found if they are allowed to be. There are simply better and more efficient ways of ensuring that knowledge creation is rewarded and that artists are credited and paid than the indefinite extension of knowledge monopolies. However, any push-back against the present situation is met with attacks from corporate entities who seek to confuse the issue by misusing terms like ‘piracy’ and ‘theft'. The Pirate Party seeks to disempower these terms by adopting them and drawing attention to the bigger picture of copyright abuse and the true theft currently underway - the theft of the public domain and our shared cultural heritage.

Policy text
The Pirate Party proposes the following reforms in order to ensure that copyright law serves the interests of the general public.

Reduce copyright duration to 15 years.
 * All material to have been copyrighted for longer than 15 years will enter the public domain.
 * Moral rights entitling creators to be identified with their work will remain unchanged.

Remove copyright restrictions applying to publicly funded material.
 * Crown copyright will be abolished for all material produced by government, including:
 * Bills, statutes, regulations, ordinances, by-laws and proclamations, and explanatory memoranda or explanatory statements relating to those materials;
 * Judgments, orders and awards of any court or tribunal;
 * Official records of parliamentary debates and reports of parliament, including reports of parliamentary committees;
 * Reports of commissions of inquiry, including royal commissions and ministerial and statutory inquiries;
 * Other categories of material prescribed by regulation.
 * Copyright will be abolished for publicly financed scientific and academic research.
 * Publicly financed institutions will be required to release all scientific and academic works under principles of Open Access.
 * Repositories will be required to make publicly funded research available to the public.
 * Government funded software will be made open-source, excepting cases where disclosure threatens national security.

Safeguard current exceptions to copyright.


 * Material created in formats accessible to persons with reading disabilities will remain exempt from copyright restrictions, and the exemption will be codified to explicitly over-ride any international export/import restrictions.
 * The copyright act will be clarified to ensure that programming made available online by radio stations is considered a broadcast for licencing purposes.

Create additional exceptions to copyright.


 * Exceptions will be implemented to cover sampling / artistic quotation.
 * These exceptions will apply to the creation of remixes and parodies, and will provide a legal basis for quotation rights on sound and audiovisual material (including musical compositions and theatrical scripts) modeled on the allowances currently applied to text.
 * Exceptions will be implemented to cover non-commercial distribution, including file sharing.

Curtail attempts to restrict consumer rights.


 * The 'Technological Protection Measures’ within the Copyright Act 1968—which grant legal foundation to the enforcement of Digital Rights Management (DRM)—will be repealed.
 * Any restrictions or limitations on purchasable items enacted in the name of copyright protection will be required to include information to consumers on the nature of the restrictions, the additional software that will be installed, and any tracking or data collection that will be imposed.
 * A 14 day grace period will be legislated allowing consumers to return any product which includes DRM
 * Restrictions on format shifting will be banned in cases of:
 * Technological format-shifting, whether physical or digital,
 * Translation into another language, and/or
 * Adaptation for the blind, deaf or similarly impaired, including braille translation, transcription of speech, or creation of spoken books.

[1] http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/shrinking [2] http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr3261/text see in particular section 103) [3] http://www.zdnet.com/au/first-person-fined-under-nz-three-strikes-law-7000010535/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law [4] http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/iprenforcement/docs/study-online-enforcement_en.pdf [5] http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/news/press/2012/New-Report-Shows-P2P-Filesharing-Streaming-Media-Use-Exploding-Worldwide.html [6] http://www.economist.com/node/17199460 [6] http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf [6] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090617/1138185267.shtml

'''Got feedback or suggestions? Send us an email at policydev@pirateparty.org.au.'''

Meeting Schedule
This working group has concluded the drafting process and no further meetings are currently scheduled.