Re: copyright under stress

Hi, this is my first post to CNI-copyright. As a fellow Australian, I just wanted to Tim Arnold Moore's assertion below.

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Timothy Arnold-Moore <tja[_at_]io.mds.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 06 Jun 2000, John Lederer <johnl[_at_]ibm.net> wrote:
> >
> > (1) Moral right. This was expressed as "If I create something it
> > is mine, not yours, and not the public's"
> >
> > (2) Legal right. Copyright laws grant monopolies for public policy
> > reasons (to expand knowledge).
> >
> > The moral right, so far as I can see, really has no justification
> > for a split between "information" and "expression". If creation
> > is what creates ownership, then surely the creation of an idea is
> > important and not the matter in which it is expressed, nor should
> > someone be able to appropriate by merely rewording.
>
> Your US-centricity has fatally undermined your argument. (2) is true
> in the US and just about nowhere else. The basis for copyright law
> in Europe, the UK and Australia is much more nebulous and, to varying
> degrees much closer to (1) than (2).

++ I have always understood that Common Law Countries (eg, UK, US, Aus) have shared the same jurisprudential approach to copyright, ie, the public utility model (2) as opposed to the continental European Civil Law droit d'auteur approach.

++ Witness the fact that Australia has been a signatory to the Berne Convention since its inception (as a result of being part of Britain), we have had our own Copyright Act since 1911 (albeit a UK re-enactment), and since 1968 we have had our own quite distinctive Act, but in the year 2000, we still have not implemented our moral rights obligations under Berne. There is presently a Moral Rights Bill floating around Parliament.

++ If our jurisprudential basis is much closer to (1) than (2) why has the moral rights component of our copyright regime so conspicuously absent?

++ I would argue that in Australia it is much closer to (2) than (1). The UK today is something of a hybrid due to its membership of the EU. But remember that the Statute of Anne granted copyright to publishers, not authors...

Nick

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Nick Smith
Executive Officer  ::  Australian Digital Alliance  
Copyright Advisor  ::  Australian Libraries Copyright Committee
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