“Piracy is a disease we have to fight together” said Ms Maureen Fondo, Head of Copyright and Related Rights at ARIPO, the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization at the Second ARIPO Annual Symposium on Shaping Copyright and Related Rights Systems in Africa held in Harare, Zimbabwe, on 12 and 13 June 2018.
From mass campaigning in the EU to open consultations in Australia, South Africa and Thailand, as well as the ongoing review in Canada, copyright debates continue to rage around the world. Read more.
Things are heating up in the discussions on the EU Copyright Directive. Ahead of a recent committee vote in the European Parliament there were trucks with billboards and elected officials receiving tens of thousands of emails in 24 hours, and death threats!
With a copyright consultation underway in Australia, and Canada going through its own copyright review process, it is interesting to see lines being drawn between the two countries’ approaches to educational exceptions.
Following incorrect assertions made during the Canadian copyright review process about how copyright operated in Australia, the Australian Copyright Council together with the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Publishers Association and Copyright Agency published an overview of the country’s legal framework as a way of assisting the Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology’s review.
In 2012 Canada changed its copyright law to include education as part of its fair-dealing exception to Copyright. The Copyright Act is now under review and the IPA and its Canadian members have testified to the negative impact of the extended exception.
Negotiations on possible future international treaties on copyright dominated the last week of May at the meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) at The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). IPA reported daily on the discussions which concluded with a surprise.