Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor welcomes the Copyright Amendment (Disability Access and Other Measures) Bill 2017. This bill has been a long time coming—three years in fact. While the government has been delaying progress, Labor has been pressing for change to ensure that copyright material is accessible for people with a disability. In 2013, when Labor was in government, we took the lead in negotiating the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled. The Marrakesh treaty allows people with a disability access to printed copyright materials, such as books, without requiring them to get express permission from the rights holder. This treaty is essential to ensuring that printed materials remain accessible to those with a vision or print disability and to removing uncertainty over who is breaching copyright in creating those more accessible formats. This bill will import the principles of the Marrakesh treaty into enforceable Australian copyright law.

It might surprise you to hear just how limited access to books and other literature currently is in Australia for those that cannot access the printed version. With current copyright restrictions in place, only five per cent of books that are published will ever go through this accessibility conversion. Without the Marrakesh treaty, serious limitations prevent access to literature. The principles of the Marrakesh treaty change the prospects of learning and reading for those who are unable to access printed materials. I cannot exaggerate just how beneficial this treaty and the copyright law amendments that will be made in honour of this treaty will be to people all over the country.

Australia has been lagging in this area. The United States branch of a website named Bookshare has almost 500,000 book titles available in formats alternative to print. The Australian branch of this website currently stands at less than 25,000 available works, all because of the current limitations within our copyright law. With this bill, Australia's existing copyright law will be amended to expand the number of titles available in alternative formats. Vision Australia, a leader in this area, will be able to carry on with their work in increasing accessibility to printed materials, unburdened by the fear of offending irrelevant and unnecessary copyright laws. In September last year, at the implementation of the Marrakesh treaty, Vision Australia's General Manager for Accessible Information Solutions, Mr Michael Simpson, said:

Having access to quality information allows people to make decisions and choices in life. The lack of information in accessible formats puts people with print disability at a huge disadvantage with their sighted peers. With more available content the playing field for this community can start to be levelled.

I cannot put myself in the shoes of someone who has lost their sight. With the copyright legislation as it stands, loss of sight equates to a loss of access to the knowledge and delight that is offered by books and other literature. This bill offers a solution that will increase access to the written word for those with a print disability. I am very proud to be part of the Labor-driven movement that has ensured that this reform will happen. It is worth noting my disappointment in the length of time that it has taken this government to make this clearly necessary change. These amendments only ensure compliance with the already signed Marrakesh treaty. This is not the first time that we have seen delay by the government to reform in this area. It took enormous pressure from Labor to convince the government to actually sign the Marrakesh treaty back on 24 June 2014. After signing, it was not until December 2015 that the government saw fit to ratify the treaty. The treaty finally entered into force on 30 September 2016. Here we stand, nearly six months after the ratification of the treaty, still waiting for the necessary legislation to implement the spirit of the treaty into Australian law.

Finally, in this bill we have reform that might give more certainty to those in the disability sector on what is and is not a breach of copyright law. It is good to see that the government is taking it upon itself to take this treaty seriously. We also appreciate that the government has pushed these changes off from the earlier controversial exposure draft bill. It is only appropriate that changes to access to literature for people with disability be removed from some of the more politically delicate areas of copyright law.

Disability access to printed materials is not the only agenda of this bill. Other important copyright changes are covered. Included in this bill are the preservation of copyright material by libraries, archives and other institutions; use of copyright material by educational institutions; and harmonisation of copyright terms for published and unpublished works. Overall, this bill will simplify exceptions to the copyright law as they currently stand, allowing libraries and archives to make necessary preservation projects and by making necessary copies. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.

Stirling Griff (SA, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like our media laws, Australia's copyright laws are antiquated and reforms are very much long overdue. The current laws have failed to keep up with changing technology, which has rendered them clumsy and means they no longer act as intended—to balance the best interests of all parties. We are making a start with the measures in this bill to redress what has essentially evolved into a discriminatory circumstance where copyrighted works cannot be altered into user-friendly formats for sight and hearing impaired people. The primary purpose of this bill is to put in place measures to improve access to copyright material for people with a disability. It will essentially require rights holders to grant an exception and allow their work to be communicated or copied into accessible formats by universities, schools and libraries or by people wanting them for personal use if they do not already exist in a commercially available format. This is in accordance with the Marrakesh treaty that Australia ratified in 2015.

This is a necessary change to end the type of charade where a teacher cannot make a captioned version of a video for hearing impaired students in the class for fear of breaching copyright or where a school cannot provide a large-print version of required reading material in a timely way because it has to go through the cumbersome and costly processes of seeking permission from the copyright holder. It is very much a silly and discriminatory situation and we are happy this wrong will be made right through this long-overdue legislation. The bill will also allow authorised bodies such as libraries to make copies of works in order to preserve them without waiting for them to deteriorate first.

But we still need to go further—much further—to address the lingering copyright loopholes and failures that are inadvertently creating an uneven playing field for schools and businesses. If we look around the world, other jurisdictions are already moving on this. The European Commission has proposed to bolster the position of rights holders, such as newspapers and musicians, to negotiate fair remuneration for their content with online platforms such as Google, Facebook and YouTube. We have seen in the past week Fairfax journalists strike over massive looming redundancies. This is one of the consequences of the failure of copyright and competition laws to keep up with rapidly changing online commerce, where online platforms reappropriate or give users open slather to shared copyright content, often with impunity. Media companies in particular are being challenged on all sides. Australian media businesses do not need to prop up Google and Facebook's multibillion dollar businesses for free. Competition is fair enough, but the current situation, where these duopolies cannibalise traditional media content and profit from it without paying fair compensation, while also taking the lion's share of advertising revenue, has to stop.

Australia certainly should consider the European Commission's proposals made last year to update and harmonise their copyright laws. Its proposal included a range of copyright reforms, including measures to facilitate digital access to published works by the vision impaired, consistent with the Marrakesh treaty, to facilitate access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled, as this bill does. But, most significantly, it has proposed forcing online platforms to pay fairly for the content they host or allow to be shown via their platforms. It has put forward measures to improve the position of rights holders to negotiate and be remunerated for the exploitation of their content by online services which give access to user-uploaded content. Its proposal also contains new transparency rules so authors and performers can be confident that they are getting a fair bite of the revenue that online platforms generate from sharing their work. The European Commission's scheme also acknowledges the unique situation of media publishers and the fact that, to remain sustainable, they need to be able to enforce their right to recoup their share of earnings from the online platforms which appropriate—

Stephen Parry (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senator Griff, you will be in continuation. It being 2 pm, we will now move to questions without notice.