advocacy and rights management bodies

This page looks at selected rights administration bodies and advocacy bodies concerned with copyright and industrial property in Australia and overseas.

Stephen Hilgartner's Acceptable Intellectual Property: The New Politics of IP (txt) comments that

If the 1970s was the decade of lost innocence about risk, then the 1990s was the decade of lost innocence about intellectual property (IP). Until the early 1980s, decisions about IP captured relatively little public attention. The field attracted scant interest except among a narrow group of specialists who practiced in a doubly technical domain at the interface of arcane law and complex technology. Most legal scholars saw intellectual property as politically uninteresting, far removed from the exciting fields, such as constitutional law, where academic careers could be made. This is not to say that IP decisions went uncontested; indeed, vast fortunes sometimes turned on the outcomes of patent litigation. But most observers saw these battles as matters that concerned the immediate parties, not as issues that raised fundamental questions about public policy, democratic decision making, and global governance.

All of this now has changed. Beginning in the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, decisions about intellectual property became visible and contentious public issues. A variety of actors - including many NGOs, academics, scientists, industry groups, and governments - now view decisions about intellectual property not as rational outcomes of an autonomous process of legal reasoning, governed by precedent and safely left to appropriate experts, but as political choices with profound stakes. Aside from a small band of libertarians, virtually no one contends that the answer is to dispense with intellectual property entirely. But there is a growing sense that the intellectual and institutional foundations of IP policy are too weak to manage its newly recognized political dimensions

Some of those actors are highlighted below.

     rights administration

Many uses of copyright in Australia are administered collectively by non-profit non-government rights licensing bodies known as copyright collecting societies. They represent the multitude of authors, composers, artists, composers, publishers, film-makers and other creators. 

Bernt Hugenholtz's 2000 paper Rights allocation in a digital environment suggests that authors gained real market power, after 100 years of copyright evolution, through the establishment of collective rights bodies.

By 'pooling' their pecuniary rights in a jointly administered corporation, the authors could now effectively impose their conditions of use upon the producers, even more so after securing the support of the legislature. ...

Authors had to pay a price for the spectacular successes of the societies. Efficiency demanded that the authors unconditionally surrender their pecuniary rights, thereby enabling the societies to offer blanket licenses to their clients (broadcasters, cable operators, restaurants, etc.). Thus, the exclusive right degenerated into a right to remuneration. For the same reasons, the societies discouraged the individual exercise of moral rights. For ever striving for higher gross income, and increasingly in competition with foreign societies, the rights organizations gradually began to resemble their traditional foes, the producers. Internally, their mission was being undermined as well. Traditionally, the societies administrated not only the rights of 'real' authors, but of other, powerful right holders as well (e.g. music publishers). As a consequence, producers have always had an important say in collecting societies' administration and politics.

Some of the major Australian collecting societies are:

Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL)

Australasian Performing Right Association Ltd (APRA)

Screenrights (AudioVisual Copyright Society Ltd)

Phonographic Performance Company of Australia Ltd (PPCA)

Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners' Society Ltd (AMCOS)

Australian Screen Directors Authorship Collecting Society (ASDACS)

Australian Writers Guild Authorship Collecting Society (AWGACS)

Visual Arts Copyright Collecting Agency (Viscopy)

This site features a detailed profile on the Australian and New Zealand societies (and some overseas counterparts), along with pointers to studies about their shape and operation.  The societies have reciprocal relations with counterparts offshore, most of which are members of CISAC and IFFRO. 

     rights owners

Among the representatives of the content creators, the International Federation of Reproductive Rights Organisations (IFRRO) and the Coalition of International Societies of Authors & Composers (CISAC) is an international grouping of copyright rights administration societies. 

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is an organisation of publishers and other IP owners, one with considerable clout in influencing government decision-making. 

The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) is a competing body, with a greater emphasis on industrial property. It is aligned with the  International Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (AIPPI) and the International Trademark Association (INTA).

The Software Publishers Association (SPA) is one of several software industry bodies. It competes with the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a US dominated body with an international focus, concerned with lobbying, education and enforcement, and the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) - target of the Boycott-RIAA site - and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are usually 'demon of the month' in the online music wars, opposed by bodies such as the Coalition for the Future of Music (CFM).

The latter boasts that "No longer will corporate media and big money frame the terms of the discussion as we draw together the strongest voices in the Internet and independent music community to reframe these questions with a clear-eyed focus on the interests of the artists." The local counterpart is the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA). The global bodies are the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is one of a number of bodies representing writers and has conducted an interesting electronic publishing testbed with Australia's IPR Systems.

The US National Writers Union (NWU) and the Authors Rights For All Campaign represent one group of rights owners in disputes with publishers, eg the current 'Tasini' litigation in the US.

May 2007 saw launch in the US of the Copyright Alliance, a content industry lobby group that brings together 29 US organisations and companies such as the Recording Industry Association of America, Association of American Publishers, Motion Picture Association of America, Microsoft, Viacom and Walt Disney.

The Alliance is opposed by the Digital Freedom Campaign, another Washington-based lobby established in December 2007, whose members include the Consumer Electronics Association, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The DFC argues that 'big labels' and studios are threatening innovation (ie sales of new electronic devices) and consumer freedom by "chipping away at the fair use rights written into" US copyright law.

     independent

Among non-government bodies the Australian Copyright Council (ACC), headquartered in Sydney, is a not-for-profit body active in advising authors, artists and others on copyright questions. Its range of guidebooks are excellent value; its staff are both knowledgeable and friendly. We recommend it. 

The associated Copyright Society of Australia (CSA) is a body for intellectual property professionals. Its US counterpart has recently established the Friends of Active Copyright Education (FACE), an online resource centre. The ACC's New Zealand counterpart is the Copyright Council of New Zealand (CCNZ).

The Arts Law Centre of Australia (ALC) provides advice and information to artists and arts organisations in all sectors of the cultural industry regarding contracts, copyright, insurance, defamation, business structures, employment and taxation. 

The Communications Law Centre (CLC), as the name suggests, is concerned with the internet and other communications law.

The US International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI) is "a non-profit organization geared for research and educational projects for the enhancement of global intellectual property protection". It has a strong focus on use/misuse by the third world of the IP of major corporations.

     consumers and manufacturers

The Australian Digital Alliance (ADA), is a local advocacy group concerned with the use of copyright, in particularly by libraries and scholars.

Public Knowledge is an international organisation with a particular concern for the 'digital commons', sharing objectives and luminaries such as Lessig with Creative Commons (CC). Like the moribund US Digital Future Coalition (DFC) it is more broadly based than most, with support from library, telecommunications, manufacturing and consumer rights interests.

The EU-based Alliance For A Digital Future (ADF) is a public-interest coalition concerned with the major European copyright reforms and other digital legislation. It is strongly supported by parts of the EU consumer electronics and telecommunications industries. 

The Ad Hoc Copyright Coalition (AHCC) is the ADF's US counterpart, competing with DigitalConsumer, established in 2002. 

The American Committee for Interoperable Systems (ACIS) represents software and hardware manufacturers in favour of loosening restrictions on decompilation and other interoperability constraints.

The US Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) opposes efforts by major content providers, in particular the film studios and record companies, to restrict access through legislation and technologies. Across the water Eurorights is attempting to build another consumer coalition.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a digital civil liberties group, notable for arguments that copyright is neither legitimate nor viable in the digital era. 

It was influential at the beginning of last decade but has been substantially overtaken by the US-based Centre for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT). The CDT has a strong interest in intellectual property, telecommunications access and privacy issues.

In spirit the EFF's close to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation (FSF), inspired by the argument that all software should be free. It advocates a 'copyleft' standard for web publications. Both the EFF and FSF have spawned other bodies, such as FSF Europe and Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA). The FSF's Digital Speech Project argues that much of the DMCA is "incompatible with freedom of digital speech". The League for Programming Freedom (LPF) is another US free software body, primarily concerned with patents.

The Union for the Public Domain (UPD) is a US advocacy group that aims to broaden the public domain while maintaining a balance between fair use and the rights of creators. It competes with the wealthier Center for The Public Domain (CPD), part of the open software push.

The library and education sectors have proved to be effective advocates in articulating issues and lobbying government in Australia and overseas. At an international level the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) lobbies the EC and other fora. In the US the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is prominent. Closer to home the Australian Library & Information Association (ALIA) has been influential. 



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