Copyright Advisory Group to the COAG Education Council
Executive summary: Australia’s copyright laws operate as a serious roadblock to preparing children to be the creators and innovators of the future.
Government policy and community expectations require schools to take an increasing role in STEM education, industry collaboration, and equipping students with the digital skills they need to be successful in the workforce of the future. However, Australia’s copyright laws – designed in the age of classroom-based “chalk and talk” teaching – are simply not appropriate for today’s world of flipped classrooms, digital learning, and collaboration. Laws designed for photocopiers are ill-equipped to cope with interactive whiteboards, tablets and robotics.
Fair use would fix the current situation, where Australian schools pay millions of dollars each year in licensing fees to use freely available internet materials for students or orphan works for which no author can be identified. Fair use would also enable sensible digital uses of copyright materials in Australian schools, in situations where there is no harm to copyright owners’ markets from the use.
Introducing a fair use exception would bring the Copyright Act into the digital age.
The Productivity Commission’s draft fair use recommendation is neither novel, nor unprecedented (despite the near hysterical reaction from some stakeholders to the draft report). Successive policy reviews over almost 20 years have recommended that Australia adopt a flexible copyright exception such as fair use.
Leading digital economies such as the United States, Israel, South Korea and Singapore have all adopted fair use style copyright exceptions with great success. If Australia wants to be a world leader in innovation, in needs to adopt world best practice copyright laws.
Fair use will not destroy educational licensing in Australia. The claim that it would was specifically tested – and rejected – by the Australian Law Reform Commission. The education sector at the highest levels has given repeated assurances over a number of years that the sector would continue to enter into collective licensing arrangements if a fair use exception were to be introduced. These claims have been endorsed by the State, Territory and Commonwealth Education Ministers, as well as the National Catholic Education Commission and the Independent Schools Council of Australia. It is disappointing that organisations such as the Copyright Agency/VISCOPY continue to make misleading claims on this issue.
It is also misleading to suggest – as has been suggested in multiple submissions to the Commission – that the decline in the Canadian publishing sector can be solely attributed to copyright changes. Much is made of the fact that some Canadian publishers have moved to the United States and that this coincided with changes to Canadian copyright laws. However, the United States has a fair use exception! It defies logic to claim that a flexible copyright exception can be the cause of a decline in the publishing sector, when the solution is to move publishing to a jurisdiction that has a flexible copyright exception.
Australian schools spend upwards of $700 million per annum in purchasing educational content for students. In addition to this, the sector pays approximately $90 million each year on collectively negotiated copyright licences. As repeatedly guaranteed by the sector, these licences will continue to exist in a fair use environment. Schools do not shy away from the fact however, that fair use would correct the current untenable position where millions of dollars of public funds are spent each year on public interest educational uses of orphan works, freely available internet materials, or non-harmful uses such as placing thumbnail images of book covers on a school intranet to show students what books are available in the school library.
Fair use does not mean that all educational uses will be free. Australian schools are not asking for a free ride – simply a fair ride.
The schools sector also strongly endorses the Productivity Commission’s recommendations in relation to copyright safe harbours. This is a long overdue change which will simply ensure that Australia complies with its international obligations, and that Australian schools receive the same legal protections for providing internet access to staff and students as is provided to commercial ISPs.
Click here for the full Copyright Advisory Group Submission (PDF)
