Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to add a couple of comments on behalf of the Australian Greens in which I substantially agree with Senator Brown's comments on the Copyright Amendment (Disability Access and Other Measures) Bill 2017. I want to acknowledge the former Labor government, both for initiating Australia signing the Marrakesh treaty and also for bumping a reference, back in 2012, I think, off to the Australian Law Reform Commission that actually set the wheels in motion for some of the very welcome changes that we see today. On that note, I would also like to acknowledge Senator Fifield's office and Senator Fifield himself for bringing this bill to us today. I will make a couple of comments towards the end of my contribution on the irony, I guess—maybe from a slightly different perspective to that of Senator Brown—of the fact that we are having to deal with this in 'non-contro', but let us start with what the bill does.

Copyright, I suppose, is always going to be a balance between, on the one hand, the protection of the rights of people who create works of art or literature, or other intellectual property, to be fairly paid and to be fairly acknowledged for their work and, on the other hand, some commonsense public interest limits to those rights. Nobody is suggesting that that balance is easy, but these are the sorts of issues that we are grappling with here and that the government has brought to us in this bill.

These issues have obviously been brought into very sharp relief in the digital age, where it is not just that the volume of creation of work has exploded but also that the speed of distribution has basically completely overrun the rather brittle system of checks and balances, some of which date back to more than 100 years ago. In this case, we are amending a bill that was written in 1968. Back in 1968, the internet was confined to a few hundred devices in the hands of US research institutions and military agencies. Rolling the tape forward, it is very apparent that thousands and thousands of hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every hour, and the tools of creation and editing and recombination have now been substantially democratised. It used to be that you needed to own a printing press or a video editing studio to be to create content. Now, of course, you carry around a printing press, a recording studio, a global research library and a distribution platform that can reach an audience of up to three billion people every time you pick up your mobile phone. That is what has substantially overrun the old distribution bottlenecks that present copyright laws were designed to protect. The distribution bottlenecks of the 19th and 20th centuries are not simply being eroded; they are being obliterated.

Amidst this free-for-all, we in the Australian Greens are absolutely and emphatically not in the business of saying that artists now have to work for nothing just because it is so easy to copy stuff. The costs of copying have fallen, effectively, to zero now that not everybody but many people are carrying these devices around. I have an arts background and I push back very strongly against the argument that, just because your output cannot be measured in tonnes, you should therefore be happy to see your creative output ripped off and shared without your consent. The point of balance here, obviously, is that we are also profoundly sick of the copyright-industrial complex and their desperate calls on governments to maintain these 20th century distribution bottlenecks, and their incumbency, through occasionally recommending breathtakingly punitive acts of parliament.

To give one example, if you are a big Hollywood studio, the idea that you can phase a cinematic release through different markets months and months apart, then string it out through release on DVD and then wring a few more bucks out of the property on scheduled television, those days are done. You simply cannot do that anymore. There is this thing called the internet that makes that kind of marketing rollout distribution strategy completely obsolete. The internet interprets these obsolete strategies as points of failure.

Game of Thrones, obviously, is the example that is used ad nauseam. I do not know if this is correct or not, but it is frequently argued that Australia is the world's biggest illegal downloader of that particular media property. Game of Thronescosts millions of dollars to create. It employs thousands of people around the world, and they have a legitimate right to get paid—the same as anybody else undertaking creative output. Of course, there is a significant, central, single reason why Australians were torrenting that series at such phenomenal rates: you had to get a really expensive Foxtel subscription and take on thousands of channels of trash, or however many there are these days, that you are not interested in watching just to watch the one thing at the same time as other people. And, as distribution is democratising and brought into the 21st century, people are happy to pay. They are happy to pay, and they are also happy to pay for curation of material as long as it is affordable and reasonably easy to get hold of. That is the 21st century distribution model, and that is where we will see those rates of piracy falling through the floor—as the distribution is brought up to date. Create the distribution channels, and people will pay.

These and other issues are what the ALRC was wrestling with between 2012 and 2014. We have also had the IT pricing inquiry. I want to acknowledge our colleague over in the other place Mr Ed Husic, who led the charge on the so-called 'Australia tax', which is basically media conglomerates and distribution incumbents charging Australians more for stuff because they can. And then they get Australian parliaments to pass laws to prevent people from circumventing that Australia tax. There are other and more sensible ways around issues like this.

We have seen bills on online infringement. We have seen, effectively, an internet filter brought in on the basis of blocking legislation and on lobbying by the copyright industry to knock files sharing sites offline. And, most recently, we had the Productivity Commission, which reported in December 2016.

This brings us to the issues in the bill that, maybe, would have been controversial—and Senator Brown alluded to them at the end of her contribution. I would argue—maybe I am alone in this—that these things could have been brought in in non-contro time, because the Productivity Commission and the ALRC both recommended a fair use regime and a regime of safe harbours to protect those other than carriage service providers.

I will read a little bit from one of my favourite set of advocates on issues such as these, the Australian Digital Alliance, who should be congratulated today for helping the government steer these reforms through the parliament. They pointed out, on safe harbours, that the proposed changes were then knocked out of the final form of the bills that we are dealing with today:

This fixes what we believe to be a long-running "error" in how Australia implemented the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA). This error has restricted the application of the safe harbour provisions in the Australian Copyright Act to commercial ISPs ("carriage service providers"). This is in direct contrast to the approach taken in all other countries that have ratified a free trade agreement which includes this safe harbour language—including the US, Japan, Chile, South Korea and Singapore …

What you are doing there is disadvantaging and knocking out universities, schools, libraries and other user services, including aggregators like Facebook and YouTube.

That is gone. That is not here, and neither is fair use. A fair use regime has been a recommendation by, basically, anybody who is credible and independent of particular commercial interests who has taken the time to look at this issue. Again, from the ADA, a key recommendation is that Australia adopt a fair use exemption to copyright. The ALRC said:

Fair use is a defence to copyright infringement. It essentially asks of any particular use, 'is this fair?'

…   …   …

In deciding whether a use is fair, a number of criteria—'fairness factors'—are considered.

I would have thought that we could have seen those two important measures, which have been subject to really widespread, fine-grain review, brought into this debate today. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Obviously, that is something for a future government—either a coalition or a Labor government perhaps—that might consider that the weight of evidence stands very strongly on the side of passing these significant reforms to copyright law.

I do not want to take away from the fact that today is the day for advocates, like Vision Australia and others who have been mentioned in the course of this debate, bringing Australian law into line with our obligations under the Marrakesh Treaty. Just to put this into plain English, under present law, if you use a text-to-speech reader to make a book or work of literature available to somebody with a vision impairment, you are breaking copyright law, and that is ridiculous. That is one of the things that we are fixing today. This is a really common sense set of reforms that manage to annoy no-one, and I congratulate the government on that. Such as it is, we think some important things have been left by the side of the road and will need to be dealt with, but it is unusual to find a bill relating to copyright that manages to get near-unanimous applause, as this bill has done.

I want to thank all of those who put in a tonne of work behind the scenes to get this on its feet, whether it be groups like the ADA, Vision Australia, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Games and Entertainment Association, but also libraries, schools and, in particular, disability advocates. Today is really your day. We are very happy to commend this bill to the Senate and see it pass the chamber.