New approaches to copyright

Associate Professor Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow at Monash University who is developing a new empirical understanding of the cultural value lost through existing approaches to copyright.

In research published as A new copyright bargain? Reclaiming lost culture and getting authors paid, Professor Giblin argues that copyright’s fundamental structure is based on outdated assumptions, such as that marginal costs of copying and distribution are high, and that registration systems are necessarily onerous and expensive.

As a result, copyright laws are increasingly failing to achieve two of their fundamental aims: to ensure the ongoing availability of information and culture, and to reward creators.

With collaborators from data science, media and communications, information science and law, Professor Giblin’s research team is developing a new empirical understanding of what society loses from current approaches—and what it stands to gain by doing things differently.

Professor Giblin argues that taking creators’ interests more seriously is the key to solving these problems. With her research team, she is developing a new copyright bargain: one that, by better securing to authors’ rewards from their copyrights, would reclaim much of the culture lost under current approaches.

To follow the progress of this work visit the following websites:

• Availability of ebooks for lending and the terms of that access: Focused Australian Study
• Author's Interest

	Insights from this research are challenging global reform discourses and informing copyright law and policy making.

 

Image: ARC Future Fellow Rebecca Giblin. Credit: Rebecca Giblin.