We can assist you in identifying your intellectual property, making best use of it and dealing with the property of others.  This page points you to some sources of information; don't hesitate to contact us for a discussion that meets your specific needs.

• what is IP? - introductions to key concepts and issues in the virtual and physical worlds, along with some of the more useful or provocative recent writing
• legislation - Australia's legislators and bureaucrats put on their 1960's board shorts and try to catch the digital surf
• who's who in the IP zoo - government and other bodies concerned with copyright, trademarks, patents and designs
• rights administration - bodies that represent copyright owners in licensing IP
• putting the genie back into the bottle - pointers to ECMS, tools for identifying, protecting and commercialising IP online.
• cyberpiracy - stealing names and other IP assets.
• the arts, academia, community - more than just digital snapshots of Mona Lisa or the neighbouring schoolkid's rad new piercing
• patents and hyperlinks - protection for online business tools and processes

  what is IP?

Pundits such as John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead and EFF fame) have asserted that copyright is dead, that information 'just wants to be free' (too bad for creators/investors who just want to be credited or even paid) and that more broadly intellectual property online is an innately flawed concept. We disagree: patents, copyright, trademarks and other forms of IP - online and offline - are alive and well.

For those wanting a succinct, cheap introduction to Australian intellectual property law you can't go past Anne Fitzgerald's Intellectual Property (Sydney, LBC Information Services 99). Her partnership with Peter Coroneus in the outstanding IP Locus site is noted below. The Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department Short Guide To Copyright Law In Australia is conveniently online. The Copyright Council's website has a wealth of information about that part of IP. The Council published Hans Guldberg's valuable Copyright: An Economic Perspective, which highlights the role of copyright-related industries in Australia's GDP and for example notes that those industries are growing at 1.5 times the rate of the total economy.

 Paul Goldstein's Copyright's Highway: The Law & Lore of Copyright from Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox (New York, Hill & Wang 94) provides a short and easily digested introduction to copyright as law, philosophy and practice from the US perspective. Goldstein's argument for strengthened intellectual property protection has received considerable support but is criticised by interests such as the libraries and theorists such as Yochai Benkler in his October 1999 paper on Intellectual Property and the Organisation of Information Production.  A perspective on Benkler's argument is provided by Jorge Schement and Terry Curtis in Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, Transaction 97).  

Ronald Bettig, in Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property (Boulder, Westview 96) and Peter Drahos, in the challenging A Philosophy of Intellectual Property (Aldershot, Dartmouth 96), provide a view from the left to complement Michael Ryan's Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition & the Politics of Intellectual Property (Washington,  Brookings 98).  Drahos' Global Business Regulation (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 00), co-authored with John Braithwaite, is a major work that provides an insightful and very readable introduction to international bodies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization.  As importantly, he anatomises how global agreements are really made and administered, as distinct from the rhetoric from Washington or the marble halls near Lake Geneva.

Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy (Zone, New York 1996) explores western ideas about originality, value and authenticity.  Despite the title, William Alford's To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilisation (Stanford, Stanford Uni Press 95) offers valuable insights into both western and eastern perceptions of creativity, the marketplace and intellectual property law.  The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 00) by Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently offers a detailed but engaging study of why IP law, particularly copyright, is so complex and why a systematic improvement seems unlikely.  It complements the elegant Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 93) by Mark Rose and The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, Duke Uni Press 94), a collection of essays on copyright theory, broadcasting, piracy, contracts, music sampling and other matters, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi.  Sherman, with Alain Strowel, had earlier edited a set of essays on theory and practice in Of Authors and Origins: Essays in Copyright Law (Oxford, Clarendon Press 94).

Shamans, Software & Spleen: Law & the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 96) by James Boyle explores microeconomics, insider trading, the human genome project and copyright in cyberspace as part of a wide-ranging exploration of where IP is heading in the 'Age of the Internet'.  Rembrandts In The Attic: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Patents (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) is a sprightly study by David Kline - co-author of Roadwarriors on the Information Highway - and Kevin Rivette.  It demonstrates that much of the value of companies such as IBM lies in its bank of patents, and more broadly in the intellectual capital that walks in and out of its offices and laboratories each day.  

Lawrence Lessig, the Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law, is a leading proponent of the view that emerging technologies mean that the protection of IP in the virtual world will be stronger than offline. So much for the mantra that if it's not dead, it certainly smells that way. Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York, Basic Books 99) provides an elegant exposition of his concerns.

Global information networks and technologies such as satellite broadcasting pose particular challenges for traditional intellectual property regimes, which are based on national jurisdictions and - to a large extent - the Customers sniffer dogs administering trade barriers at the border. A succinct analysis is provided by Dan Burk's Transborder Intellectual Property Issues on the Electronic Frontier article for the Stanford Law & Policy Review.

  legislation

Australian copyright law is currently undergoing major changes, with two Bills before the national parliament and reports by the Copyright Law Review Committee (CLRC) an advisory body, being considered at the same time. The controversial 'Digital Agenda',Bill, meant to address the challenges of new technologies such as the Internet - and associated draft legislation on Performers' Rights and Moral Rights Bill - are currently stuck in in the legislative pipeline.

At the national level the new Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee (IPCR), established as part of the National Competition Policy, is to report this month on competition aspects of copyright, patents, trademarks, designs and circuit layouts legislation. It released an issues paper late last year, arguably over-impressed by the rights of users such as libraries and schools.

The Coroneus-Fitzgerald Australian Intellectual Property Law Locus, an online collection of reports, legislation, judicial decisions and articles, is outstanding. 

There has been a wave of new intellectual property journals over the past decade, as IP has begun to shed its fusty image.  Among new kids on the block the Perth-based intellectual property Digital Technology Law Journal is worth reading. The UK-based Copyright World offers a monthly email bulletin on international copyright developments.

  who's who in the IP zoo 

Intellectual property is a patchwork of differing national laws and administrative regimes. At the moment there is an uneasy coexistence between two global bodies - WIPO and the WTO - with an interest in IP as a commodity, engine of national culture and subject of international agreements that seek to harmonise the threads in that patchwork.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO), as the name suggests, is an international governmental body (with private sector representation) concerned with global trade agreements. It has taken an increasing interest in intellectual property.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), headquartered among the gnomes and gold bars in Geneva, deals with the Berne Convention and other specifically-IP agreements, several of which date from last century.  It is now an agency of the United Nations, replete with lavish conferences, endless drafts and proliferating committees or working parties.  All in all, a bureaucrat's heaven.

Within Australia responsibility for copyright is shared by the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department (A-G's) and the Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts (DCITA). Those bodies produce two newsletters: the A-G's e-News on Copyright and DCITA Copyrites. Trademarks, patents, genome rights and designs are dealt with by the confusingly-titled IP Australia (the former Australian Industrial Property Office and Patents & Trademarks Office). The IP Australia site provides a useful introduction to intellectual property per se.

Among non-government bodies the Australian Copyright Council (ACC), headquartered in Sydney, is active in advising authors, artists and others on copyright questions. Its range of guidebooks are excellent value. The Australian Digital Alliance (ADA), currently hibernating offline (?), seeks to serve as a pro-user lobby group in the development of new legislation such as the 'Digital Agenda'.

The Arts Law Centre of Australia (ALC) provides advice and information to artists and arts organisations in all sectors of the cultural industry regarding contracts, copyright, insurance, defamation, business structures, employment and taxation. The Communications Law Centre (CLC), as the name suggests, is concerned with the Internet and other communications law.

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is one of a number of bodies representing writers and has recently announced an interesting electronic publishing testbed with Australia's IPR Systems.

  rights administration 

Many uses of copyright in Australia are administered collectively by non-profit non-government rights licensing bodies known as copyright collecting societies. They represent the multitude of authors, composers, artists, composers, publishers, film-makers and other creators. Some of the major collecting societies are:

The Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) represents authors and publishers.

The Australasian Performing Right Association Ltd (APRA), represents composers, lyricists and their publishers

Screenrights, the AudioVisual Copyright Society Ltd, represents owners of copyright in films and other audio-visual products.

The Phonographic Performance Company of Australia Ltd (PPCA) and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners' Society Ltd (AMCOS) represent record companies and music publishers.

The societies were the subject of a 1995 landmark report, the Review of Australian Copyright Collecting Societies by lawyer Shane Simpson. Last year the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal & Constitutional Affairs released Don't Stop The Music!, the report of its inquiry into music copyright and small business, in particular the operation of APRA and the PPCA.

CISAC is an international grouping of copyright rights administration societies.

  putting the genie back in the bottle 

The notion that technologies such as the Internet have permanently let copyright out of the bottle is misplaced.  Our assessment is that a mixture of copyright (and contract) law, on-the-ground enforcement, judicious pricing and new technologies such as electronic copyright management systems (ECMS) will enable an appropriate balance between the rights of users and owners in a real-world environment, not the academic fairyland inhabited by some policymakers.  

We'll shortly be including an overview of the major ECMS developments, examining principles, potential and specific projects.  The 9 March conference in Sydney, hosted by the Australian Copyright Industry Alliance, showcased INDECS (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems) - an international project developing mechanisms for trading intellectual property online, including text, audio-visual content, music and multimedia works.

Development of industry-wide or cross-media numbering systems is seen by many as a prerequisite for effective global electronic copyright management. Geneva-based InterDeposit has developed the InterDeposit Digital Number (IDDN), currently in use mainly for MP3 recordings. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a US-based identification system for intellectual property in the digital environment. Developed by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the International DOI Foundation on behalf of the publishing industry, it is intended as the basis for seamless, automated copyright management and electronic commerce systems.

The ISWC Number is a 'universal' unique identifier developed in Europe and associated with the Common Information System (CIS) developed by international copyright body CISAC.

Local digital rights management experts IPR Systems are initiating interesting large scale trials in partnership with the Australian Society of Authors and other bodies.

  cybermarks and cyberpiracy 

Globally, the regime for allocating domain names is inconsistent and confusing.  A major point of contention has been ownership of domains that reflect corporate or brand names, with conflict leading to establishment of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit private sector body that assumed responsibility from the US government for four key Internet functions and is characterised by its critics as the unelected government of the Web on behalf of big business.  

We'll be providing more information about domain naming, cybersquatting and piracy in the near future.  In the interim four articles provide different perspectives:

Marketing Your Website: Legal Issues Relating to the Allocation of Internet Domain Names, a 1998 article by Brian Fitzgerald, Leif Gamertsfelder and Tonje Gulliksen in the Uni of NSW Law Journal, is a brief introduction from down under.

Dan Burk's 1995 paper Trademarks Along the Infobahn: A First Look at the Emerging Law of Cybermarks, available in the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology, has become a classic.

Kenneth Dueker's Trademark Law Lost in Cyberspace: Trademark Protection for Internet Addresses in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology is less incisive but offers facts and figures (eg as 1994 some 14% of the 'Fortune 500' found that their preferred domain name had been registered by another entity).

Sally Abel's Trademark Issues in Cyberspace: The Brave New Frontier in the Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review updates discussion in the US immediately prior to last year's contentious Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act.  The news from the US is that baseball's New York Yankees feature in what is likely to be a test case about the constitutionality - and general effectiveness - of that Act, increasingly criticised as badly drafted and potentially allowing profiteers with deep pockets to ride roughshod over legitimate owners of trademarked names.

  the arts, academia and community

On the academic front the major news is the recent release in December 1999 by the US National Academies of a 160 page report on The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age

Last year the Australian National Academies Forum (NAF) held a two-day symposium on Scholarship, Intellectual Ownership & the Law in the digital environment. The event was marked by divergent opinions, ranging from laments for the decline of patronage and the rise of digital bugaboos through to hardheaded advice about self-help in the humanities and commercialisation of scientific discoveries.

Our Culture, Our Future, a wide-ranging and contentious report by Terri Janke on Indigenous intellectual property issues for the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was launched in Sydney in September last year.

The Performing Arts Multimedia Library (PAML) was a Commonwealth-State project that explored legal and production aspects of copyright in online performing arts.  A Five Step Guide to Contracting and Copyright Management of Digital Recordings for the Live Performing Arts is now available on the PAML website.

  patents and hyperlinks

Intellectual property protection for online business methods and tools such as shopping cars is increasingly contentious, with criticisms that the US Patent & Trademarks Office has lost the plot.

We'll be providing pointers to the debate in coming weeks.  In the interim, why not explore the articles by Chris Holt.  Stefan Bechtold's Link Controversy Page (LCP) is a rich resource if you are interested in the debate about deep and shallow linking or framing.

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