POOR old Chester Carlson. He spend nine years trying to flog off his useless invention. Then in 1944 an obscure company signed a royalties agreement with him.
That company is no longer obscure. Carlson’s useless invention was to replace the perfectly efficient practice of using carbon paper in type-writers with a machine that made copies. The company became Xerox.
Now five billion photocopies are made in the world each day. In Australia alone 500 million photocopies will be made this year.
Those making the copies will be ignorant of the copyright law, or will breach it with impunity. A law breached with such frequency loses its moral force. It’s not the morality that is wrong, but the law.
But to change the law to keep up with technology is a tortuous process. Newspaper proprietors have just delivered to the Copyright Law Review Committee a 250-page submission (of which I have a photocopy!) seeking a change to the law so they can get paid for the astronomic amount of photocopying of their products by governments, media-monitoring companies and educational institutions. The law was passed in 1968 and based upon earlier law which was put in place decades before the plain-paper copier changed our lives.
The submission says the media-monitoring business is now worth $11 million a year, and media proprietors are not getting any of it. Media proprietors, however, are not popular people, so any argument that they are getting a raw deal is likely to be treated with derision. But if I owned a company which went to all the trouble, cost and risk to produce a newspaper or magazine, I’d get pretty cheesed off if other companies started copying my product a flogging the copies off for a profit of $11 million a year.
Some of these companies supply material to government departments, and, of course, the governments make copies themselves. The law allows the government to make copies, but it must pay. In August, the Government agreed to pay 2c per page, the money to be collected a distributed by the Copyright Agency Limited. But that money is not going to the proprietors. By a quirk of the law, the individual journalists and their union are getting it instead.
The aim of the 1968 law was to let journalists publish books of their collected words. Unfortunately, the way the law was worded it gave newspaper and magazine proprietors copyright for publishing in periodicals, and copyright to the employee journalists for all other purposes. Now that photocopying, scanning and databases have mushroomed, the “”all other purposes” test has new, unintended significance. The 2c a page photocopying fee is to go to the individual journalist, or if the journalist is too apathetic to join the copyright agency to pick up the money the journalists’ union, the Media Alliance, has very nobly offered to pick the money up for them and to apply it to the worthwhile cause of sending its officials to copyright conferences and other copyright-linked matters.
The proprietors who provide the wages for journalists to create the works, and the buildings, desks, computers, wages, lighting, heating, paper, presses and other wherewithal to create the material in the first place get nothing.
It’s hardly justice. Clearly the intent of the law was to let journalists publish books of their own work and the newspaper owners have copyright for mass production. Now photocopying has reached the stage of mass production, the law should be changed to reflect technological reality.
And photocopying is mass production. In August, just two surveyed media-monitoring companies supplied 15,667 copies of newspaper and magazine articles to government departments. Incidentally, The Age headed the list with 17 per cent of material copied, probably because not many copied come in to Canberra. The Canberra Times with 13 per cent was next, perhaps because many public servants want to know when their garbage will be taken out, but more likely for learned articles about the service in which they work. The Australian, the Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald followed with about 35 per cent between them.
There is, however, a major obstacle in changing this law. Usually, people seeking changes lobby the Government and bombard the media. If the Government were to change this law, despite the obvious justice and merit in doing so, it would have to take away the ill-gotten windfall that has fallen into the lap of the Media Alliance and its members in the Parliamentary Press Gallery _ something the Government might be reluctant to do.