Australian Authors.
Thank the universe.
This was something that all Australian authors were worried about-the proposed changes to copyright laws. Under the proposal, copyright for authors, which was in line with the international standard of existing with the author or their heirs/assigns for 70 years after their death, would be changed. The change would make it so the copyright would expire 15-25 years after the first publication date of the work.
The author of this proposal is the Productivity Commission, who are tasked with finding new and interesting ways for people to be productive and the government to make money. Its basic role is to help the government to make better policies in the long term interest of the Australian community.
The next proposal by the commission is one that hasn’t been rebuffed by the government or agreed to-in short, the government has given a non-answer on the question of whether or not they’ll go with this recommendation. This is to remove PIR-Parallel Importation Rules-where "an author owns territorial rights to their work, which means that they can sell their book to one publisher in Australia, one in America and another in the UK, and those publishers have an exclusive right to sell that book within their market only. Booksellers can therefore only buy bulk copies of a title from the publisher who has rights in their own territory, so Australian booksellers purchase from Australian publishers." [1]
As it stands at the moment, a consumer can buy a book from anywhere in the world. The system in place is fair and balanced, in that people can buy books in Australia published by Australian publishing houses or imports from overseas publishers, or they can buy books from overseas retailers such as Amazon, Book Depository or secondhand merchants such as Better World Books. Basically, the way it is, everyone gets paid, everyone's happy. This is the system in place in the US and UK as well as here, but it might not be here for much longer. Who knows.
Lastly, there is the debate of what constitutes fair use and that’s a murky thing at the best of times. Who knows what will happen there.
There's a petition to support Australian authors which is still up and running, so if you want to sign and support, that would be wonderful.
https://www.change.org/p/scott-morrison-save-australian-literature-stop-parallel-importation-of-books
[1] https://www.asauthors.org/copyright-under-threat#TOC
This was something that all Australian authors were worried about-the proposed changes to copyright laws. Under the proposal, copyright for authors, which was in line with the international standard of existing with the author or their heirs/assigns for 70 years after their death, would be changed. The change would make it so the copyright would expire 15-25 years after the first publication date of the work.
The author of this proposal is the Productivity Commission, who are tasked with finding new and interesting ways for people to be productive and the government to make money. Its basic role is to help the government to make better policies in the long term interest of the Australian community.
The next proposal by the commission is one that hasn’t been rebuffed by the government or agreed to-in short, the government has given a non-answer on the question of whether or not they’ll go with this recommendation. This is to remove PIR-Parallel Importation Rules-where "an author owns territorial rights to their work, which means that they can sell their book to one publisher in Australia, one in America and another in the UK, and those publishers have an exclusive right to sell that book within their market only. Booksellers can therefore only buy bulk copies of a title from the publisher who has rights in their own territory, so Australian booksellers purchase from Australian publishers." [1]
As it stands at the moment, a consumer can buy a book from anywhere in the world. The system in place is fair and balanced, in that people can buy books in Australia published by Australian publishing houses or imports from overseas publishers, or they can buy books from overseas retailers such as Amazon, Book Depository or secondhand merchants such as Better World Books. Basically, the way it is, everyone gets paid, everyone's happy. This is the system in place in the US and UK as well as here, but it might not be here for much longer. Who knows.
Lastly, there is the debate of what constitutes fair use and that’s a murky thing at the best of times. Who knows what will happen there.
There's a petition to support Australian authors which is still up and running, so if you want to sign and support, that would be wonderful.
https://www.change.org/p/scott-morrison-save-australian-literature-stop-parallel-importation-of-books
[1] https://www.asauthors.org/copyright-under-threat#TOC