[pp.au.general] Balancing Human Rights with Copyright

[Roderick]

Hi all,

As you may or may not be aware, the National Human Rights Consultation  
Committee is currently taking submissions as a means of gathering  
community input regarding Human Rights in Australia in a report it  
will deliver to the Australian Government. Online submissions are open  
until 15 June 2009.

Further information can be found here: http://www.humanrightsconsultation.gov.au/

Just briefly, the key consultation questions and scope of the  
consultation are:

Which human rights and responsibilities should be protected and  
promoted?
Are human rights sufficiently protected and promoted?
How could Australia better protect and promote human rights?

What does this have to with the Pirate Party? I’d be interested in  
working with a few other people in drafting a submission on behalf of  
the party with respect to copyright, namely issues to do with ever  
encroaching ‘intellectual property’ regime and freedom of expression  
and access i.e. those rights afforded under Article 19 of the  
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also the conflict presented  
in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely the  
right to some sort of protection to be provided for the material and  
moral rights with an author’s creation, contrasted with the right of  
us all to learn, experience, cite, build upon, remix and make collages  
of knowledge and culture - generally to participate in culture, to  
disseminate it, to partake in intellectual exchange, without impediment.

Of course, this raises questions of whether or not the party may  
choose to support an Australian Bill of Rights position, and there has  
already been some debate on these forums regarding that.  However, the  
terms of reference is explicit in stating “[t]he options identified  
should preserve the sovereignty of the Parliament and not include a  
constitutionally entrenched bill of rights.” So our solutions to  
resolving, protecting and promoting rights, for the sake of this  
submission anyway, should not rest solely on the installment of a bill  
of rights.

This is also something that we might involve the PPI in, even though  
the submission will be very much focused on the Australian situation,  
the rights we are advocating are universal.

All that said, this is only a brief proposal, and there is probably a  
lot more that could be included in such a submission, however we only  
have until 15 June - so if you think you’d like to work on something  
with respect to it, please get in touch with me at roderick at ppau  
dot info and we can as a small group begin to research, plan and write  
this submission, and probably score a bit of publicity with it too.

Looking forward to everyone’s input, ideas and criticisms.

Rod

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