QUT News, 22 February 2024 22nd February 2024 The role of intellectual property rights in technology transfer to developing countries and least developed countries to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a major theme of a new international…
[Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi] More than 40 countries with over one-third of the world’s population have fair use or fair dealing provisions in their copyright laws. These countries are in all regions of the world and at all levels of development. The broad diffusion of fair use and fair dealing indicates that there is no basis for preventing the more widespread adoption of these doctrines, with the benefits their flexibility brings to authors, publishers, consumers, technology companies, libraries, museums, educational institutions, and governments.
[Jonathan Band] Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has assented to a new copyright act that updates the country’s exceptions and limitations for the digital environment. Most significantly, the act replaces a closed fair dealing provision based on the English copyright law with an open provision modeled on the U.S. Copyright Act’s fair use right. The adoption of an open fair dealing provision by Africa’s largest producer of copyrighted material should put to rest arguments elsewhere on the continent that open exceptions are inimical to copyright industries.
[Jonathan Band] The Israel Ministry of Justice has issued an important opinion concluding that the use of copyrighted materials in the machine learning (ML) context is permitted under existing Israeli copyright law. In particular, the opinion found that ML typically will fall within the scope of the Israel Copyright Act’s fair use provision. The opinion thus adds to the growing body of law around the world permitting the use of copyrighted works for ML and text and data mining (TDM).
[Aram Sinnreich, Patricia Aufderheide and Donte Newman] Abstract: A comparison of the behaviors of two creative populations operating within cross-media environments in the U.S. and Australia tests the comparative effect of the two nations’ legal environments on the range of creative expression and on costs of production in increasingly digitized production processes.
[Stephen Beemsterboer] Abstract: For more than a decade, the Internet Archive has been collecting and digitizing books as part of its “Open Library” project. The unofficial e-books are made available to the public under a legally untested concept called “controlled digital lending” (CDL), premised on the notion that libraries should be able to lend their books online in much the same way that they do in person. Under the theory, a library may grant restricted digital access to one patron at a time per physically held copy of a book. Once a patron’s access to the book ends, another’s may begin. The process is meant to digitally replicate a physical library loan, and it works just like borrowing an official e-book through a local library.
[Electronic Information for Libraries] In December 2021, the National Assembly’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry called for public submissions and comments on new, substantive amendments to the Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B-2017], based on inputs from the previous public consultation in June 2021. The wide scope of the proposed amendments surprised many stakeholders because the previous consultation was clearly limited to certain, specific issues contained in reservations by the President on the constitutionality of some sections of the Bill. Instead, the new amendments effectively frustrate the exceptions enabling quotations, reporting of current events, translation, personal use, as well as activities of libraries and archives, including lending, access to digital works, making preservation copies, format-shifting and inter-library document supply.
This submission concerns the interaction between copyright and AI. The recommendations herein reflect the shared opinion of the intellectual property scholars who are signatories to this brief... In what follows, we explain: The importance of approaching the questions raised in the consultation with a firm commitment to maintaining the appropriate balance of rights and interests in Canada’s copyright system, consistent with a robust principle of technological neutrality; The importance of ensuring that text and data mining (TDM) activity can be undertaken in Canada without the threat of potential copyright liability. We therefore propose both an opening up of Canada’s fair dealing doctrine to better accommodate TDM activities, and the enactment of a specific statutory provision to confirm that uses of copyright works and other subject matter for TDM (whether commercial or non-commercial) do not infringe copyright; The importance of resisting calls to extend copyright protection to AI-generated outputs. We therefore propose maintaining and confirming the existing principled requirements of human authorship and original expression as preconditions of copyright protection, and we caution against any move to establish new neighbouring or sui generis rights in respect of AI outputs. Works generated by AI should remain in the public domain.
[Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights] We provide this comment on Clause 13, section 12A of the Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B-2017]. Section 12A is an open general exception for “fair use” of copyrighted works. This provision is largely an updating of South Africa’s current general exception for “fair dealing” with a copyrighted work. The primary improvements of Section 12A over the current fair dealing exception are (1) to open the list purposes to which the exception can apply by virtue of including the words “such as” before the list of authorized purposes, and (2) providing an explicit balancing test to determine whether a particular use is fair.
[International Federation of Library Associations] Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) has become widely talked about over the last two years, and in particular in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the specific term has only relatively recently come to be used[1], forms of controlled lending have been utilised for many years, for example in the context of document supply. As such, controlled lending has helped to fulfil the mission of libraries to support research, education and cultural participation within the limits of existing copyright laws. Licensed eBooks have opened the door to a radical undermining of the traditional public interest functions and freedoms of libraries. These still exist for paper books, but with the advent of licensed eBooks, libraries are no longer free to decide when or what to purchase, with some publishers even refusing to sell to libraries. Controlled digital lending provides an alternative to a licensing approach, and so a means of redressing the balance.
[Sean Flynn] South Africa Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry has invited a further round of public comments on the Copyright Amendment Bill provisions to introduce fair use and expand limitations and exceptions for libraries, education and other public interest uses. The Committee invites submissions with reference on the expansions on the Bill’s provisions fair use and for other purposes in Sections sections 12 and 19. It also invites comments on additional sections of the Bill that may implicate the “alignment” of the Bill with the provisions of several international treaties.
[Ariel Katz] Abstract: According to conventional wisdom, a fundamental difference exists between the American fair use doctrine and the Canadian fair dealing doctrine (or that of other Commonwealth countries): while American fair use can apply potentially to any purpose, fair dealing could only apply to the explicit purposes enumerated in the statute. Accordingly, the argument goes, fair dealing cannot apply to dealings for unenumerated purposes no matter how fair they might be. This conventional wisdom is false.