RE: Re: Fair Use in UK

It's also worth noting that there was quite a backlash at the time the legislation was going through parliament, against the liberal (or plain ignorant) interpretation that people put on the fair dealing exceptions - doing stuff that could not possibly be called fair dealing. Of course, the fact that no-one ever devised a formula for identifying fair dealing didn't help (although at one stage the British Copyright Council did promulgate some guidelines, in which 10 per cent featured prominently, I think), but I do believe that setting an arbitrary (and purely qualitative) threshold is not easily reconciled with an overriding concept of fairness.

I think of this as an early manifestation of what we have observed in recent years - most people expect the law to permit what technology enables them to do.

Peter Groves
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-----Original Message-----
From: 'Timothy Arnold-Moore' [mailto:tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au] Sent: 21 June 2004 16:01
To: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property Subject: [CNI-(C)] Re: Fair Use in UK

Edward Barrow writes:
> Peter Groves has already explained the fact that classroom
> copying is covered by the CLA licence - this is a blanket
> scheme, under which the local education authorities pay an
> annual fee to CLA for the right to copy extracts of up to one
> chapter from a book, one article from a periodical issue, or
> 5% if greater, so there's no bartering by teachers at all. In
> fact the contractual nature of the licence gives teachers
> much more certainty than fair dealing possibly could.

Australia provides equal certainty under the fair dealing exception without a virtually compulsory licencing scheme (we get 10% without fee, you appear to be paying for 5%). I fail to see why the fee is necessary in the light of the existing fair dealing provision in the UK. I observe that my old law school (University of Melbourne) published and continues to publish printed notes with copies of articles, book chapters, whole cases, and legislation without relying on any licencing schemes quite happily.

Of course, licencing schemes also exist here in Australia. I suspect many schools (in Australia and the UK) may be paying for schemes more for peace of mind than because the law requires it of them.  

> The USA is unusual in providing such a broad exception for
> the benefit of
> education: in smaller economies, generous educational copying
> exceptions risk making educational publishing uneconomic.

While Australia's exception is not as broad as the US's, with respect to education, it is at least as broad. I think you will find the market in Australia (20 million) significantly smaller than the US (290 million) or the UK (60 million) yet we still seem to have a robust educational publishing industry (of course mainly owned by the large multi-national publishers). I suspect the laws in the UK have more to do with the influence of the publishers in the UK Parliament than sound economic policy.

-- 
| Tim Arnold-Moore, Ph.D., LL.B., B.Sc. (Hons)
| Address:  RMIT Multimedia Database Systems
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|           Melbourne 3001
|           AUSTRALIA
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| Fax:      +61 3 9925 4098
|	simul iustus et peccator


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