Media Education and Copyright Law

Cushla Kapitzke is the next speaker here at ATOM2006. She focusses on the implications of copyright law changes in the wake of the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and how they may impact on media educators. She notes the rise of a large variety of neologisms - postindustrialism, fast capitalism, the information age, the creative economy, postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalisation, and McDonaldisation - even while the U.S. remains firmly routed in the traditional assumptions of modernity in a variety of ways. Libraries, for example, are often still excellently set up, but remain largely empty as they've failed to engage with the post-modern information needs of their clients. Cushla suggest a set of epochal shifts, from ancient ceremony to the traditional library of modernity, to the new 'libr@ry' which is being explored developed in a number of configurations by various organisations.

She notes that much of this is about the politics of copyright, too: about 'brand name bullies' and the major copyright industries attempting to lock down use of their content, and about the new digital generations reconceptualising alternatives approaches to copyright as an expression of free speech. She also notes Foucault's assertion that "the author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning" ("What Is an Author?", 391).

And copyright is changing: the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) notes the ubiquity of copyright in everyday life, even while driving the criminalisation of copyright infringements through increasing penal sanctions. Copyright is seen as the 'sleeping giant' on the TRIPS and international education agenda; Lawrence Lessig suggests that the aim of the copyright industry not just to control what is theirs, but to to assure that all there is is what is theirs. But of course this is not an argument outright against copyright - copyright fulfils an important role in striking the balance between the originators and users of content: it must both encourage creators to create, and enable them to profit, but must also ensure that creators can build on the work of others. Richard Stallman contests the idea of intellectual property itself, however - calling it 'a mirage'. At any rate, since WIPO was established in 1967, IP has been locked into a variety of transnational trade agreements, and Cushla suggests that this is a problem. Powerful lobby groups from the U.S. and EU are driving these developments, and this has profound implications for developing countries.

Cushla now moves on to consider the impact of globalisation - she notes that globalisation enables a tying together of global issues (for example emerging from WIPO) and local issues - and governmentality, examining the result of competing actions between those in control and those being controlled. This is particularly relevant in relation to the AUSFTA, of course, where the United States quite directly make the connection between intellectual property enforcement and the 'war on terror'. Such theoretical approaches open a space for counterconduct by those opposed to the tightening of IP regimes, then - punitive sanctions are not incontestable, and there is a wide spectrum of initiatives working both with and against normative legislative procedures and practices. Indeed, there is also a new journal called Public Knowledge Futures which will continue this debate. Together, these may envision a creative use rights ecology to provide a balance, corrective, or alternative to the brave new future of copyright law.

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