Copyright In Australia Essay

880 Words2 Pages

INTRODUCTION
Copyright is an important contributor to protection of free speech rights because it provides incentives for content creators for the continual creation of novel material. In essence, it allows content creators to freely innovate and express themselves while conferring rights towards the exclusivity of their work, without fear of others making use of their work for personal gain, thus denying them opportunity to obtain remuneration. Copyright in Australia currently runs from the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy year after death, notably after the signing of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) in 2005, giving copyright owners and their beneficiaries an extended period of time to benefit from exclusivity of the work. …show more content…

Such an argument would take a form in expansion of current exemptions in the use of copyright material, namely fair use in the United States (US) and fair dealing in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. They both deal with the protection of copyrighted material use in different ways. The recommendation by the Australian Law reform attempts to reconcile their differences by combining both, providing more exemptions. This essay will explore the importance of having exemptions to copyright, contrast both fair dealing and fair use defences and how both serves to protect expression. Additionally, the essay will explore how the recommendations will serve, are are necessary, to improve free speech rights to users in this current epoch.
WHY HAVE EXEMPTIONS?
Copyright law appears to favour the free speech rights of content creators and rightly so. Without incentives, we may very well see original content, vital to the culture of all societies, diminish. Such a view is evident in even in the interpretation of the first amendment, hailed as the preeminent protector of free speech rights in the the US, in Harper & Row, where the verbatim publishing of former president Gerald Ford’s memoirs in the

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