Singapore’s Ministry of Law and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) have announced a comprehensive review of the city state’s copyright laws, inviting comments until 24 October.
The IPA this month submitted an intervention to the New Zealand government as it considers a bill to amend national law as part of the implementation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement.
In June 2016, the IPA made two significant international interventions, in Australia and Uruguay, to ensure the voice of publishers is heard as lawmakers try to make sense of proposals to change their national copyright laws.
In January, the US Copyright Office announced a study of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the 1998 law in the US that is meant to allow rightsholders to remove material that infringes copyright from the internet while exempting innocent online service providers from liability.
In 1985, Professor Michael Fraser entered the complex world of copyright by accident. Having casually responded to a job ad in the Sydney Morning Herald (and having got the job as 'the only applicant wearing a tie'), the young Michael Fraser's career began with a three-week investigation into the growing problem of photocopying, for the Australian Copyright Council.
Carlo Scollo Lavizzari, the IPA's expert legal adviser, provides a post-mortem of the 32nd meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) held on 9-13 May, 2016, in Geneva.
Canadian novelist and poet, John Degen, who is also the Executive Director of The Writers' Union of Canada, wrote a no-nonsense piece debunking the five lazy lies routinely deployed by "copyleftists". As we look ahead to a week when WIPO's copyright committee will meet to debate several issues with potentially highly significant impacts on world publishing, John kindly gave the IPA permission to reproduce his article, which he originally posted on his blog.
The IPA has thrown its weight behind a growing chorus calling for the Canadian Government to urgently reconsider changes to the country's copyright laws that are doing significant damage to Canadian educational publishing.