Ericsson calls for consumer-friendly, market-promoting copyright reform

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 03 November 2011 13:30

IT Policy - Regulation

Ericsson has produced an opinion paper calling for the development of a competitive and consumer-friendly digital content market to enable easy and lawful access to digital content, saying that copyright enforcement alone will not put an end to the present rampant piracy.
 

"Any future copyright enforcement policy should ideally be developed from a clear and evidence-based approach," it says. "An approach that carefully balances the incentives and rewards provided to economic rights holders against fundamental rights of privacy, self-expression, due process and the user rights embodied in copyright law to protect access, learning, critique, and reuse."

The paper Copyright Enforcement In The Networked Society has been authored by Ericsson Group's director government and industry relations, Rene Summer; Dr Nicolas Suzor, a researcher in intellectual property and technology law and a lecturer in the law school at Queensland University of Technology; and Patrick Fair, a partner in the Technology, Communications and Commercial Group of Baker & McKenzie in Sydney.

The paper summarises what it calls "The apocalyptic advances of technology in creative industry" and the steps taken by copyright owners to counter the impacts of these starting with "the enactment of the Statute of Anne by the British Parliament in 1710, the first copyright law in the world."

It concludes that: "the development of copyright law has predominantly been to strengthen the rights of economic rights holders by expanding the time-span and scope of the exclusive rights, increasing penalties for infringement, and reducing their private costs of enforcement.

"The networked communications infrastructure and the use of networked applications will decisively continue to shape the digital competitiveness of nations. Hence, a one sided approach to enforce copyright at the expense of all other stake holders and at the expense of digital competitiveness of nations is NOT the answer."

The authors argue that, rather than continuously expanding copyright, enforcement and increasing deterrence, future reforms should be: fact based, balanced, include all relevant stakeholders, focus on end user demand, respect the right to privacy and freedom of communication, support continued innovation in new technology and services, promote growth of lawful digital services and market efficiency and respect the relative nature of property rights such as copyright.

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