Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Copyright Amendment (Disability Access and Other Measures) Bill 2017, which contains a range of reforms to several areas of copyright law. There are a couple of aspects of the legislation that I would like to speak about. The first is about making books accessible to visually impaired people. Now, obviously I have my own visual impairment, but I am lucky: I can take off my glasses. I may not be able to see the members opposite without my glasses—that can be quite a bonus!—but I would be able to read a book that was in front of me. So, whether it is a hard copy or a Kindle, I have never been denied access to the latest novel or political tome. But that is not the case for many people, whose visual impairment means they do not get a rush from walking into a bookshop that I do.

This bill, which implements Australia's obligations under the Marrakesh treaty, helps change things. In June 2013, the Marrakesh Treaty was adopted. It is part of the body of international copyright treaties administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The treaty's main goal was to create a set of mandatory limitations and exceptions for the benefit of the blind, visually impaired and otherwise print-disabled. Let us keep in mind that the announcement of the new treaty was nearly four years ago and it was the first of its kind in the history of the multilateral copyright system. Australia played a key role, and I remember reading about it then, when then Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus expressed his pride in the role Australia had played in the negotiations, working hard to find a balance between the rights holders and the visually impaired. The negotiators also had to work hard to find a balance between the needs of the developed world and the developing world.

The treaty allows signatory countries to make exceptions from copyright laws to enable the creation of accessible format copies—for example, with large print or braille or as talking books. What is more, these copies can be taken across borders. I think it helps address what has been described as a book famine, where an estimated less than five per cent of the world's published works are made into accessible formats. The treaty itself—and this legislation follows from that treaty—also contains safeguards for rights holders, including the application of a domestic commercial availability test so that the exceptions operate only where an accessible format copy is not available. This test protects the interests of authors and publishers, and we always need to think of their interests because they are only able to keep being productive thanks to the income that their copyright generates.

In August last year, former Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes explained the problem that he and many others faced, saying he and other vision-impaired Australians could not import legally-produced audio and braille books without the specific permission of the publishers, and that was not always easy to get. Vision Australia also noted that the law was needed and called for swift passage by the new parliament. I am not sure this meets my definition of swift—it has been quite a few months, and the process, as the member for Isaacs has given detail on, has been a really tortuous journey—but it is pleasing to see that this bill has finally reached the parliament.

The bill will help many in our community access literature that was previously unavailable to them in a form they are able to use. It also contains other changes to the Copyright Act, including improving the ability of libraries, archives and other cultural institutions to preserve copyright materials. They will no longer have to wait until the item is all but destroyed or seriously compromised to be able to make copies. It will also streamline and simplify the statutory licenses available to educational institutions and allow those institutions to use copyright material in online assignments, something previously impossible under the act. I am not sure, but there may be a generation of students who are now going to thank us—or not—for this change!

There are other updates to the act in this bill that harmonise the term of copyright for certain works. There have been a whole bunch of anomalies, I have to say, around copyright. For instance, one anomaly was that a perpetual copyright was given to historic letters and other unpublished documents. That meant that organisations like the Australian War Memorial were unable to digitise them if there were no heirs left to approve the change—they needed to get permission from somebody. The same issue affects Jane Austen's letters and Captain Cook's diaries. Those unpublished letters will not be as much of an issue now, because the bill implements a new general protection period of life-plus-70 years and does not differentiate between published and unpublished works.

I note that many of these provisions are the result of a negotiated consensus between stakeholders and are strongly supported by the library sector, so it is great to see and I hope that we see its passage move smoothly. But I do want to make mention, just in closing, that the draft of this bill contained an extension of the current safe-harbour protections, changing it from carriage service providers to service providers. I note that this has been removed. I have no doubt that that will be a debate we have at a later date.

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