Enforcement
House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs ‘Cracking down on copycats: enforcement of Copyright in Australia’: Committee Recommendations (November 2000) and Government Response (June 2003)
- Overview of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs ‘Cracking down on copycats: enforcement of Copyright in Australia’ Report – November 2000
- Overview of Government Response to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs Report ‘Cracking down on copycats: enforcement of Copyright in Australia’ – June 2003
- House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs ‘Cracking down on copycats: enforcement of Copyright in Australia’ Report – Recommendations and Government Response – June 2003
Overview of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs ‘Cracking down on copycats: enforcement of Copyright in Australia’ Report – November 2000
The Report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, ‘Cracking Down on Copycats: the enforcement of Copyright in Australia’, was released on 4 December 2000. The report, the first Parliamentary inquiry specifically on copyright enforcement undertaken in Australia, was in response to a reference dated 17 March 1999 from the then Attorney-General, the Hon Daryl Williams AM, QC, MP.
The focus of the terms of reference was on the Committee’s investigation of, and views on, the appropriate options and mechanisms needed for the improvement of copyright enforcement in Australia. It was to do so having regard, in particular, to the types, circumstances and scale of copyright infringements in Australia and the mechanisms and resources available for enforcement or prevention of those infringements.
World-wide, issues of intellectual property enforcement, of which copyright is a significant element, have attracted attention. Consultations on intellectual property enforcement have been conducted by a number of jurisdictions from the date of the reference in early 1999. These have included investigations or consultations by the European Union, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong China, and New Zealand.
The Committee concluded that the available data on infringement was piecemeal and that Australia’s levels of infringement, by international standards, were low. Nevertheless, the Committee found that the evidence provided to it indicated that commercial infringement of copyright was a significant and costly burden to many Australian industries that rely on creative endeavour. The Committee made a range of other findings relevant to the terms of reference which are found in Chapter 2 of the Report and which provide the backdrop to its recommendations which are largely contained in chapters 3 to 6.
Chapter 7 of the Report discusses a number of issues related to the inquiry, these being the Parliamentary library exception (Recommendation 22), the relationship between infringement and censorship, the infringement of copyright in broadcasts and the protection of performances from unauthorised exploitation. While, apart from the first matter, no specific recommendations were made on these items, the Committee’s views are taken into account in the on-going policy consideration of these matters.