02.28.06
Copyright protection in Oz gets silly
I haven’t checked this out yet so apologies if any of it is based on wrong information. Boing Boing is carrying a story that the Australian Copyright Agency wants to collect money from schools for use of the web. Boing Boing has already described some of the reasons why this is wrong and unworkable. Firstly, there is an implied licence to read stuff published on the web (if you want money for it, you generally put it behind a pay wall). Secondly, a lot of the stuff on the web is not collected by professional authors.
I would add a few other reasons. Firstly, why single out schools? Why not put the tax on corporations (maybe because they won’t pay and they’ve got the power to fight back!). Secondly, what about pages from overseas? The more you start to look at this the sillier it gets.
But the main reason why I – as a professional author (I’m talking here about my journalism not my blog!) – think it’s ridiculous is that I won’t see any money from it anyway. I am a member of the Australian Copyright Agency. It’s free to join and they collect photocopy licence money on my behalf, mainly for articles I had published in The Australian before leaving in 2004. Depending on what I’d been writing about, it sometimes boosted my annual income by $AUS1000 per year, which was quite a nice thing. (Mainly when I’d been writing about government as the public service employs people to photocopy clippings AND actually pay their licence fee, neither of which are commonplace in the corporate world). But while print journalists in Australia who are staff at a newspaper or magazine (freelancing is a different matter) own residual rights for print reproduction of their work (including photocopy licence fees), they own NO COPYRIGHT over work published on the web.
Put bluntly, if schools started paying a fee to view my work online, it would go straight into Rupert Murdoch’s pocket, not mine.
