It has been a long road, but at last it looks as if we are moving closer to meaningful and, potentially, quite transformative copyright reform in Ireland.
It has taken two years but, after extensive consultation, consideration of a wide range of submissions from groups and individuals, and further feedback, the Government-
appointed Copyright Review Committee has published its report, Modernising Copyright (available here: http://iti.ms/1cDXCrH)
The committee included Dr Eoin O'Dell of Trinity College (chairman), Prof Steve Hedley of University College Cork and Patricia McGovern of DFMG Solicitors.
Copyright reform seems to be in the air internationally, with reconsiderations of this always fraught topic under way in the the UK,
the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, India and – of
direct relevance to the Irish situation – the EU.
There's one overriding reason it is on so many national agendas. Reform is being driven by a fundamental shift between the time when current laws were drafted, and today: the
arrival of the internet.
Trivial effort
In a digital era, when the effort of making a copy has become trivial, and the potential to publish globally constrained primarily by how fast someone can click a mouse, copyright needs to
be revisited.
And this needs to be done with a consideration of the viewpoints of those who create, those who publish and those who wish to share, use or transform existing works.
There are some obvious applications – how copyright should serve those who, say, create a photograph or a piece of music or writing that is made available online. But the universe of relevance for copyright is much broader.
What considerations should pertain to sharing material? To linking to it? To using an excerpt for a search engine or a post on a discussion board? To incorporating others’ creative work into a new work?
And what about writing software and using and building upon existing ideas or code? Digital innovation in this area almost always is a further development of something that already exists. How much transformation makes something new rather than a plagiarised copy?
What is the best legal process for dealing with questions and legal actions? Should there be a separate system for handling such specialised complaints?
Public meetings
Attempting to answer such questions has made the report's gestation process a long one. There were two public meetings, an initial set of 100 submissions that resulted in a consultation paper early last year, and another 180 submissions following the paper's
publication. All that has gone into the final report.
It deserves a very wide audience. What business sector remains totally
untouched by the internet or the use of digital technologies? What artist, writer, musician? What publishing company? What engineer, computer scientist, entrepreneur, lawyer, non-profit organisation, multinational or SME? Or indeed, which one of us? If you use the internet or a computing device, this topic
is relevant to you. If you've tweeted, posted to Facebook, used a discussion forum such as Boards.ie or linked to a newspaper article such as
this one, then this review affects you.
Disappointing
It's therefore disappointing that the Government has, to some degree, presented the report primarily as a business issue, especially, a potential pump primer for bringing
in US multinationals who might be seeking a flexible copyright climate, more
akin to that in the US with its "fair use" doctrine.
The Government press release says the report "is aimed at identifying any barriers for innovation in the digital environment and developing proposals for reducing them in order to provide greater support
for growth and jobs in the digital industry."
The report is both
practical and daring and
will no doubt spur much discussion and response.
Key elements include a recommendation to create a Copyright Council of Ireland and specialist intellectual property tracks in the District and Circuit Courts, and, as the report notes: “the introduction of tightly drawn exceptions for innovation, fair use, and very small snippets of text in the context of online links”.
General linking
It recommends that general linking be allowed, something the average person will welcome, but which will be controversial for some online publications. It also calls for explicit protection be given to photographs through the use of watermarks and other identifying metadata (description information embedded in the file). Parody will also be given explicit protection.
Of great interest to those in the technology and creative sectors will be the recommendation that it be permissible to derive an original work which either substantially differs from, or substantially transforms, the initial work.
There's far more, impossible to include here. Download it yourself – at the very least, to go through the summary
of recommendations.
Then, if you wish to contribute to the debate, there will be a public forum on December 9th at the Royal Irish Academy, where the committee will present its findings and the community can respond.
