Rescheduled Fifth Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture: 'Copyright's Private Domain'

Professor Graeme W Austin, J. Byron McCormick Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, will give the Fifth Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture in the Queen's Building Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College. Attendance is by invitation only. If you would like to attend, please contact Carol Hosmer in the CIPIL office before 5th October. cipil@law.cam.ac.uk

The public domain is valorised as the repository of raw material that makes all creativity possible, but it is not the only counterpoint to copyright's system of exclusive rights. With the current emphasis on the public domain in copyright commentary and political activism, we risk losing sight of the importance to creative processes of private imaginative activity, including private engagement with copyright-protected works. This lecture will examine ways that copyright and privacy law work together to create a "private domain," in which intellectual, imaginative and artistic experimentation and creativity can occur, away from public scrutiny and judgement. In the era of YouTube and MySpace and the like, with their relentless encouragement of public dissemination and display, it is useful to recall the importance of private contemplation and experimentation to the "learning" that copyright is meant to encourage.

Key copyright doctrines and policies map out copyright's private domain: copyright's protective attitude toward unpublished manuscripts, its exclusion of "private" performances from copyright owners' exclusive rights, defences for research and study, private copying provisions. On the privacy side, there are venerable links with copyright: copyright's solicitude toward privacy interests contributed to the development in some jurisdictions of a common law privacy right. Copyright's private domain is not a substitute for the public domain. Even so, recognition of the links between copyright and privacy, including of the ways that both foster creative and imaginative activity, might usefully contribute to debates about how best to fashion copyright law in a manner that serve the interests of both owners and users of copyright-protected works.