The Irish Copyright Review Committee has released its report, Modernising Copyright. Below are two excerpts from the introduction. Click here for the full report.
Summary of Recommendations
The centerpiece recommendations relate to the establishment of a Copyright Council of Ireland and specialist intellectual property tracks in the District and Circuit Courts, and to the introduction of tightly-drawn exceptions for innovation, fair use, and very small snippets of text in the context of online links.
The position of rightsowners will be improved, by recommendations to extend remedies, technological protection measures, and rights management information. Furthermore, photographers in particular will benefit from the recommendation that copyright protection for metadata be strengthened.
The position of copyright users will also be improved, by recommendations to introduce the full range of exceptions permitted by EU law, including format-shifting, parody, education, disability, and heritage, as well as related exceptions for non-commercial user-generated content and content mining. Furthermore, copyright deposit libraries, in particular, will benefit from the recommendation that the existing legal copyright deposit provisions be extended to digital publications. Finally, all users will benefit from a comprehensive recommendation that any contract term which unfairly purports to restrict an exception permitted by the Act should be void.
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Innovation and Fair Use
We recommend the introduction of tightly-drafted and balanced exceptions for innovation and fair use. Given the significant nature of these changes, we specifically recommend that the Minister’s power to determine the date on which they come into operation should be expressly reiterated in these sections, so that they may come into effect on a graduated basis at appropriate times.
As to the innovation exception, we recommend that it should not be an infringement of copyright to derive an original work which either substantially differs from, or substantially transforms, the initial work (section 21 of the Bill).
As to the recommended fair use exception, it is very circumspect, and differs substantially from the US doctrine. We recommend that the existing exceptions be regarded as examples of fair use, that they must be exhausted before analysis reaches the question of fair use, and that the question of whether a use is fair on any given set of facts turns on the application of up to eight separate factors (section 29 of the Bill).
