The Monday Muse is a back after a hiatus and this week we’re doing something slightly different. A few weeks ago, several of us had an email conversation about the parallel importation of books in Australia. What follows is a slightly edited and tidied up version of that conversation.

But first, what is parallel importation? There is a lot of information on the Productivity Commission’s website, but here’s a good basic summary of the issues:

When a bookshop imports copies of a book published overseas that are also available from an Australian publisher, this is parallel importing. Parallel importing (in theory if not always in practice) gives customers cheaper books and a greater range of titles. On the other hand, parallel imports make it much harder for local publishers to survive and this reduces the support available to local authors in the early stages of their careers. Australia has a fascinating (and in my opinion eminently practical) compromise: parallel imports are allowed if a book is published overseas and no Australian publisher issues a local edition within 30 days. This may be about to change. [Garth Nix, Nick Earls against parallel imports, Talking Squid]

It seems that there is no consensus amongst Australian librarians about this issue. On the one hand, peak bodies such as ALIA, CAUL and National and State Libraries Australasia support lifting the restrictions. On the other hand, other bodies such as the Australian School Library Association and Public Libraries, New South Wales – Country Association wrote submissions against lifting the parallel importation restrictions

Onto the conversation about this…

Morgan: I’ve been aware of the debate about the parallel importation provisions concerning books in the Australian Copyright Act for only a little while. Several weeks ago, there was some interesting discussion in the WAIN list about this. ALIA has made a submission for lifting the restrictions on the parallel importation of books, which should reduce increase competition and reduce the price of books in Australia.

It seems that on this issue, ALIA has the same bottom line position as the big retailers, including Coles, Woolworths, K-Mart and Dymocks and is on the other side of the fence from Australian authors and publishers.

Maybe it makes no sense for these cultural protections to be in the Copyright Act, as ALIA mentions. Under most circumstances, I’d be happy to see any scaling back of the Copyright Act. But this isn’t really a debate about IP. ALIA tries to respond to the argument that these changes will hurt the Australian publishing industry by stating that the New Zealand publishing industry had not been hurt by similar changes in NZ. But that didn’t sound too convincing, especially after I read the submissions from the NZ publishers and authors, stating that the changes there had hurt the NZ industry.

I think it’s an interesting topic because both sides have validity. Why should Australians pay significantly more for books – how does this impact libraries and readers? On the other hand, if these changes hurt the Australian publishing industry, who will identify and support Australian voices?

Con: This would be an interesting topic! Can I admit now that I haven’t made up my mind on this yet??

Morgan: My mind isn’t totally made up on this either. I am leaning towards the “no” side, but I’m willing to be convinced.
Looking at ALIA’s full submission, this point does seem reasonable:

International publishers continue to be significant beneficiaries of the current restrictions, as the subsidiaries or branch offices of international publishers in Australia can take advantage of a distribution monopoly that prevents retailers from sourcing cheaper books from overseas.

Protectionist policy is a blunt tool for providing incentives for local publishers, and we strongly agree with the position outlined in the Issues Paper:

[I]f the government has the objective of assisting Australian book producers (whether authors, publishers or printers), direct subsidies or other policy instruments could achieve this objective at less cost to the community than is associated with parallel importation provisions.

So the debate isn’t so clear cut as small independent Aussie publishers versus those money grubbing multinationals.

On the other hand, if they did ease the restrictions on parallel importation, I am extremely skeptical that any government would ever introduce direct subsidies to independent Australian publishers which they contemplate in the last paragraph.

Kathryn: If it is the PI rights that restrict other media of the work from being distributed in a market, then I am totally against. It is impossible to legally obtain electronic copies of many books, and people who want to read them are forced to resort to Other Methods.

snail: I have so far written a 3-4 paragraph post for my blog on related matters. ie how I’m buying more and more books via amazon, etc because I can get them for half of what I can locally.

Richard Flanagan wrote a good article in the weekend SMH [link, also published here - the remarks on PI start on page 3 of the pdf], arguing against the changes in terms of what they mean for local authors. I see his point but feel the argument is somewhat lost already by the reality of the net especially when we now have things such as:

http://www.booko.com.au
which makes it way easy to do all the cross country comparisons I was doing manually prior. Have ISBN, will find

I recently read an interview with a Spanish writer, Zafon, which rather impressed me. The local shops only had the paperback of his previous novel, The Shadow of the Wind. I hooked into booko and found a limited edition (1000 copies, nicely bound (fine paper, deluxe cloth, sewn binding), and signed) via Amazon US which was 40% off (now 37% off) and will cost me about AUD$71 including delivery.

I can’t source that locally. There’s a bunch of stuff that I can get for half of what it costs locally and don’t get me started on the OED pricing.

The Australian bookbuying market is being gouged royally, and mostly by the English publishers. The proposed changes seem to be swinging the pendulum from the English publishers to the US publishers.

Michelle: Very good topic and as I am also sitting on the fence, I would love to see the arguments and hopefully the comments that will come with it, before I decide for myself.

Corey: Here’s an article which outlines another facet of the issue:

Damn Publishers
By Melissa Gregg
The Excellence in Research for Australia initiative will make publishing outcomes more important than ever. But present indicators of academic merit appear poised to punish Australian research for its very Australian-ness.

Essentially it is arguing that:
- The research is Australian focused and yet the Australian publishers won’t publish it as they focus on text books
- The international publishers won’t publish it because it has an Australian focus.

It occured to me that perhaps this is a sign of a monopolistic market in that the Australian publishers can afford to be picky about this because they’ve all got the same sorts of policies.

Fiona: Good point Corey!

It’s been a long time since I thought about this issue and I can’t remember the main points, but it struck me as being similar to the dual importation of CDs argument which ended up being a non-starter because people didn’t like buying inferior, cheap CDs in the end so they weren’t widely sold.

I’d be interested in the quality viewpoint of this – is it better to have books produced more cheaply in a country that can, for example, ramp up green printing facilities, or maintain Australian employment? I know that when I buy books I like to check and see where they were printed and I won’t buy expensive paperbacks if they were printed overseas or the binding is flimsy.

According to a recent study from Harvard, file sharing and copyright as they stand at present, are beneficial to society.

The working paper “File sharing and Copyright” from economists at the Harvard Business School,  raised important issues including:

• File sharing has not discouraged creative production. Although album sales have fallen, the number of albums being created has grown dramatically. This trend can be seen across all creative industries.
• Downloaded songs can increase sales, with mashups potentially leading to increased sales and any such works leading to increased attention for an artist and therefore increased sales
• File sharing may not result in decreased creativity, as there may be increased sales on complementary services such as concerts/speaking tours etc.

Very interesting to see that its not all bad news for the publishers etc, who try so hard to increase copyright protections.  To do so in light of the data this study brings out, could seriously affect their bottom line and would seriously impact future creative production.

If you don’t want to read the full paper, Michael Geist has a good summary.

This statement comes from LIANZA – via LISNews.org

LIANZA welcomes the announcement by the Prime Minister that Section 92A of the Copyright Act is going to be repealed and that the Government proposes to introduce a much fairer copyright provision to prevent unlawful downloads from the Internet.

LIANZA reiterates its support for clear copyright law that strives to achieve a fair and equitable balance, for the ultimate benefit of authors and copyright owners, users of in-copyright works, and society as a whole.

LIANZA wishes to be involved in the formulation of any future law and is looking forward to working with other relevant parties in the sector to develop a fair and workable model.

We would be interested in hearing from other LIANZA members who would like to be involved in this process.

Glen Walker
President
LIANZA

More on this situation can be found at:

• Copyright Code submissions back repeal of 92A

Will be interesting to see if that happens and then to see if the Australian Government takes any notice of the outcome (that hopefully being the repeal).

Anyone who has spent any time near the information desk in an academic library has heard about the EndNote software. Those of us who have been looking for alternatives generally choose the Zotero Firefox plugin for a whole range of different reasons.

Whilst reading my RSS feeds this morning I came across a post entitled “Thomson Reuters Takes Virginia to Court over Zotero” on the OStatic blog.

The post briefly outlines court action that has been brought against the makers of Zotero by Thomson Reuters due to some new functionality in the latest Zotero beta.

From the post:

George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users collect and manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter’s EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero’s newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format.

The post concludes that the case would appear to be weak, see the full post, and I would have to agree that it feels frivolous as well.

I can’t help but wonder what, if any, damage this will do to the Zotero image. Particularly in the typically risk averse senior management levels of academic libraries. My instinct tells me though that Thomson Reuters is about to find out what it is like to take on a community of passionate users.

What are you thoughts about the case?

According to “Digital copyright: it’s all wrong” a report in Fairfax newspapers from Graeme Philipson, the US has “circulated a draft Discussion Paper on a possible anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting in Tokyo in July.” This document is concerning those who have read it, as it “would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws”. Only suspicion is required to be able to legally enable this to happen.”

In Australia, they would almost have to pull up everyone carrying a phone, a laptop or other mobile device on suspicion of having something illegal contained therein. Then there is the time it would take to check such devices to find any infringing content. We already have long lead times at our ports of departure, this would only make it so much longer again. However, that doesn’t put it out of the realm of possibility.

The agreement also proposes an international copyright governing organisation, separate to the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations, ” a global police force, answerable to no-one, with intrusive powers that vastly exceed those currently available to adherents of the concepts of intellectual property.”

What happens with mashups then too, where content has been remixed. Will this governing organisation be manning all partner country ports to do the examining and assessing of the legality of a device’s content?

There is a big can of worms in this discussion paper and I have only touched on a few of them. What other issues can you see being raised by this and do you think it will ever make it into law?

Late last month tango posted about a report on Australia’s Internet filter. It sparked some discussion and one of the main points was that we, those in the discussion, believe that user education is more important than filtering.

With this in mind it was interesting to read on The Australian IT website an article entitled “E-security lessons for Aussie kids“. The main thrust of the article is summed up by a quote attributed to a Digital Economy department spokesperson:

“Children are recognised to be the heaviest users of the internet, and most comfortable using new technologies … Given this, e-security education within schools would provide children with the knowledge they need to protect themselves. It is envisaged that students will use the skills they learn at school to improve the e-security measures taken at home.”

It is encouraging to see that user education is a component of the plan. It’s also interesting that it is being specifically targeted at children. I would hope that parents listen to their children and participate in learning about these issues as well.

I would also hope that the information that the children are given to “recognise the legal and other consequences of sharing software, music, movies and other copyright information” will include open licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses and the GPL.

The photo “iMac Delight” was uploaded to Flickr by Jennie R. F.

Random House Audio has announced that “it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers.” (from Boing Boing)

Random House Audio  provides downloadable audio to popular Random House print titles, as well as titles from other publishing houses.  Their audio is available through iTunes, Audible and eMusic.

“In the announcement, Random House notes that they’ve been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they’ve come from DRM’ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs.” (from Boing Boing)

If other publishers of downloadable audio follow suit, they should find that a whole new audience will be taking advantage of their services – for one, public libraries who have been loathe to having to choose between iPod and MP3 formats.

It will be interesting to see where things go from here.

The Queensland State Government has approved the use of Creative Commons licences for intellectual property generated by its departments.  This came about as part of A Government Information open access and use strategy and is expected to be a precursor to the Australian Federal government following with a Creative Commons licences for data generated at the national level. (see also article in the Guardian – UK)

Only data where “no issues of privacy, confidentiality or other legal or policy constraints apply”  will have this licence applied.

The Copyright Amendment Act 2006 included exceptions making it legal to format shift our movies and music in Australia – eg. could legally copy our CDs to our MP3 players or iPods, tape television to watch later on etc.

The Attorney General’s department has to review the exceptions in the Act after two years.  This review process includes seeking public feedback and is open now.  If you would like to see these exceptions continue or expand, why not consider a submission.  More details, including how to make a submission are available from the Australian Copyright Council.

Just seen on Senator Andrew Bartlett’s blog: Copyright Bill passes Senate.

The senator points to this blog: Weatherall’s Law, for more detail and commentary on the amendments.

Related post: Australia’s impending copyright laws.