Day February 15, 2018

How Copyright Law Is Holding Back Australian Creators

[Kylie Pappalardo and Karnika Bansal] Australian creators struggle to understand copyright law and how to manage it for their own projects. Indeed, a new study has found copyright law can act as a deterrent to creation, rather than an incentive for it. Interviews with 29 Australian creators, including documentary filmmakers, writers, musicians and visual artists, sought to understand how they reuse existing content to create. It considered issues such as whether permission (“licences”) had been sought to reuse copyrighted content; the amount of time and cost involved in obtaining such permissions; and a creator’s recourse if permission was either denied or too expensive to obtain.

Re:Create Report – Unlocking the Gates: America’s New Creative Economy

[Re:Create] Over the span of just two decades, the internet has unlocked the gates to the new creative economy, empowering nearly 15 million Americans to create their own content and earn billions of dollars in revenues from posting online. Internet platforms like Amazon Publishing, Instagram, Etsy and YouTube have been driving forces behind the growth and expansion of the dynamic, multibillion-dollar new creative economy... An estimated 14.8 million Americans used the following nine platforms in 2016 to earn income from their independent, personal creations. These independent creators earned an estimated $5.9 billion in 2016 from their creations.

Intellectual Property Policies for Solar Geoengineering

[Jesse Reynolds, Jorge Contreras and Joshua Sarnoff] Abstract: Governance of solar geoengineering is important and challenging, with particular concern arising from commercial actors’ involvement. Policies relating to intellectual property, including patents and trade secrets, and to data access will shape private actors’ behavior and regulate access to data and technologies. There has been little careful consideration of the possible roles of and interrelationships among commercial actors, intellectual property, and intellectual property policy.