I cannot think of a less deserving class of people than the one which cleaned up after the Federal Court’s decision on copyright last week _ union officials.
At stake were the royalties for copying newspaper articles in educational institutions and government departments. The people who missed out were school-children, parents, taxpayers and the people who paid for the creation of the works under dispute in the first place _ the newspaper proprietors.
The dispute has been going on for five years and has been marked by union greed, inaction and protection of mates by the Federal Government and utter incompetence by the media proprietors. The seeds of the strife go back to the 1960s when the key section in the Copyright Act was enacted. Generally copyright goes to authors of works, but if they are in employment then it goes to the employer. An exception was made for journalists working on newspapers and periodicals _ just in case they wanted to produce a book of their works.
The law said that the employer got the copyright for publication in any newspaper or periodical or broadcast, but “”not otherwise”. This was drafted before photocopiers were invented. The “”not otherwise” was meant to refer to books, not photocopying or electronic storage. In the typically dilatory way Federal Parliament deals with copyright, nothing was done about it. Later the Copyright Act gave goverment bodies and educational institutions the right to copy any material provided they paid copyright owners. A sampling and levy scheme has been set up run by the Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL). It samples copying, collects fees and distributes them to copyright owners.
The journalists union thought it could put its snout in the trough by claiming to represent all journalists and collect on their behalf. The money would be given to any individuals who claimed (precious few) and the rest would go on the union’s pursuit of copyright issues _ pleasant junkets to Berne and elsewhere for union officials. The gutless Federal Government refused to update the law for fear of upsetting a union. So the media proprietors who pay the journalists’ wages and provide them with research resources could do nothing to collect money when articles from their papers were copied. This money built up very quickly and is now several million dollars a year.
The proprietors then launched a foolhardy action in the Federal Court asserting they owned at least part of the copyright and to prevent CAL from distributing it. Inevitably it failed. The union was not a party, but it will get the bulk of the spoils. CAL intends to distribute the bulk of the fees collected for newspaper copying to the union because it has asserted (in my view spuriously) that it has copyright in the journalists’ work by virtue of membership rules. And of course the richer a union the harder time it can give the employer who passes the resulting the costs to you, dear reader and advertiser. It gets worse. If the law were changed so the proprietors (like every other employer) got the copyright, the proprietors say they would waive copyright royalties for educational institutions. Instead, money goes from struggling schools to undeserving union officials.
As for the royalties from government copying of newspapers, it is a great big freebie going from taxpayers to a union that contributed not one whit to the intellectual or economic input that created the works. The proprietors bungled. They knew this was coming several years ago and should have insisted that all new journalist employees sign a copyright agreement before getting a job. With fairly high turnover, they would own much of the copyright by now. What is to be done? Individual journalists should join CAL (phone 008 800875) and demand they be paid individually so the money does not go to the undeserving union. They can then use the money for some suitable educational purpose.
I figured this fiasco was coming two years ago and did precisely that. I got $500 last year. Money that morally belongs to The Canberra Times, so I bought a CD-ROM drive to make legal research for articles easier. If Parliament won’t do it, you have to take the law into your own hands.