The APA has just publicly released its submission to the government's reform proposals.
All submissions were due by February 25 but only the APA's has been made public so far.
It was written by Stuart Glover and the only good thing about it is that it is very lucid and accessible. Stuart has always been able to write.
Unfortunately however, its content is really, really, and so predictably, bad!
I am reminded of the American author Upton Sinclair's famous observation: 'You cannot expect a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it'.
I am a living testament that deeper, balanced, and fact-based perspectives only rise to consciousness after a corporate has been freed from working for the Man!
The submission is banal, whiny, timid in the extreme, and, importantly, it utterly refuses to engage at all with the concept of user rights. In fact its cynicism and contempt is laid bare. It refers to user rights as user 'rights'.
It just rejects every sensible and justifiable reform suggested by the government, no matter how minor and incidental. And it makes absolutely no attempt to quantify the financial losses publishers would suffer if they were enacted.
Let me quote some words and phrases that are liberally sprinkled throughout:
the drift in copyright law towards expanding 'rights' for users; interprets 'access' to mean free access; 'gifting' libraries new rights; substantial impact on educational publisher revenues; the government and schools may save 'nickels and dimes', but revenue cuts to publishers will eventually suppress the extent and diversity of the materials that are available; the 'reforms' as drafted do not appear to repair any real gaps of access; the draft threatens to undermine; unintended back-door access; libraries would be gifted a right which would see them act as a publisher; (The quotation marks, and there are many, are in the submission).
The APA calls on 'the Minister and Government to 'park' this exposure draft and to involve creators and industry directly on redrafting...' (As if major consultation hasn't happened over the last decade or so, and as if the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Productivity Commission, and this long enquiry process itself hasn't given every entity and individual the ample opportunity to inform the government of their views).
There is not one suggested reform, no matter how minor, that the APA doesn't oppose. It just wants nothing to change at all, just in case one dollar of revenue may be foregone. Frankly I find it shameful, not to say embarrassing.
It also continually suggests that the user communities just don't live in the 'real world'! They know little about commercial operations and challenges. This palaver disguises the publishers' own ignorance of customer usage in the real world, and the pettifogging analogue restrictions that are now so cumbersome.
After reading this submission I re-read the government's Exposure Draft to see whether I'd missed stuff the APA was concerned about, but I found absolutely nothing. I was again impressed by how solid, sensible and fair it was. Sure, the Copyright Agency will suffer an annual revenue loss (probably around $12-15m), but in the scheme of things that would be a minor hit to individual publishers. The Agency's annual revenues are now around $150m.
I can just imagine how the departmental staff who wrote the Draft will react to this submission. 'God, are they serious?' they will say. 'They're just bloodsuckers, and they have no idea about their customers, much less any care for them'.
