The Copyright Amendment Bill 2006 is coming up before the Australian Parliament this week for debate. If the Australian Parliament passes the bill, it will fail to protect commercial entities from new copyright exemption provisions that will be for libraries, archives and research work.
Dr. Matthew Rimmer from the ANU College of Law says;
The Australian Government has actually narrowed the defence of fair dealing for research and study. There are new minor Copyright exceptions on time-shifting, format-shifting, non-commercial use by libraries and archives, and satire and parody. However, such provisions have been so narrowly framed that they are largely unworkable and inoperable.
He added,
Search engines such as Google will be in particular strife under such a regime. As a commercial entity, they will not be allowed to take advantage of these exceptions.
So, what does this mean for the search engine giant Google? If the amendments are ratified Google cannot digitize things like books etc, provide image thumbnails, archive and cache content or even index news as it does on Google News.
Dr. Rimmer further said;
The proposed laws need to be further developed if we’re going to foster the technological innovation and creativity promised by companies like Google. It would be better if we adopted an open-ended defence of fair use as exists in the United States. The US Supreme Court has described the defence of fair use as ‘the guarantee of breathing space for new expression within the confines of Copyright law’. The Bench has also called the defence ‘an engine of free expression’.
Not only does the defence cover particular purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, the US courts have held that the defence of fair use embraces such activities as time-shifting and space-shifting, parody and transformative uses, reverse engineering, and the use of thumbnail images in search engines. This provides a much wider safe harbour than that offered by the Australian Copyright Amendment Bill 2006 (Cth).
So while Google may just escape in the US, it faces some strict legislations in Australia now. If the Aussie model is adopted in other nations (I am particularly interested the EU and South American countries), Google as well as other major search engines may have a game on their hands.
We would like to know your opinion on this.
News: Physorg.com
