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

Meeting Minutes This document is a record of a meeting. Do not edit this document without contacting the relevant group first.

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