CIPIL Seminar: ''Orthogonalising' Copyright: Reclaiming lost culture and getting authors paid'

Speaker

Rebecca Giblin, Associate Professor of Law, Monash University Australia

Abstract

Copyright is fundamentally a system of incentives and rewards. It is intended to incentivise initial production and continued investment in works in order to achieve the broader benefits that result from widespread dissemination of knowledge and culture. Beyond that, it is meant to reward authors for their contributions of personality and labour.

But current approaches do a poor job of achieving either of these aims. Copyright’s incentive component is supposed to promote works’ continued availability, but rights are awarded in full, upfront, regardless of whether those investments are actually made – and very often they are not. The rewards component arises from creators’ moral claims, but the nature of creative labour markets means it very often ends up in the pockets of investors instead. Thus, current ‘lump sum’ approaches cause enormous loss of culture – while still failing to get authors paid.

In this CIPIL seminar, Giblin will explore how taking authors’ interests in copyright seriously could provide the key to meaningful reform. Combined with careful navigation through the international treaty framework’s gaps and flexibilities, she will argue it’s possible not only to (finally) improve authors’ remuneration outcomes, but simultaneously to free up neglected rights for fresh exploitation, support the emergence of new distribution models, reduce oligopolies and reclaim lost culture.

About the speaker

Dr Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor within Monash University's Law Faculty. During 2011 she was the Kernochan Visiting International Intellectual Property Scholar at Columbia Law School in New York, and in 2013 a Senior Visiting Scholar in residence at Berkeley. Dr Giblin has published widely in the areas of copyright, access to knowledge (A2K) and regulation of emerging technologies, including Code Wars (Edward Elgar, 2011) and What if we could reimagine copyright? (ANU Press, 2017). In addition to her ARC Future Fellowship project (introduced in this seminar, see also authorsinterest.org), Giblin is also the lead Chief Investigator of an ARC Linkage Project, working with legal, social and data science researchers, together with library partners in five jurisdictions, to understand the legal and social impacts of library e-lending. She tweets @rgibli.