Today, April 23rd, is World Book and Copyright Day. This is a day that has been celebrated by UNESCO and its supporting countries since 1996, after being established by UNESCO's General Assemby in 1995.
By celebrating this Day throughout the world, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright.
23 April: a symbolic date for world literature for on this date and in the same year of 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors such as Maurice Druon, K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo. It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity.
UNESCO - World Book & Copyright Day
Books are one of the great joys of my life and it's great to have a special day on which to celebrate books and all they mean to us and the societies we live in. We encounter copyright every day - whether we read a web page, look at a book or magazine cover, watch TV, or perhaps create our own original work. But, while I think celebrating World Book and Copyright Day is a great idea, I am not convinced that copyright deserves celebrating.
I hold copyright in a number of published works, and have lost copyrights to publishers. It's easy to understand copyright in the context of a printed book, but not so easy in an increasingly digital world. What does copyright really mean today?
A search on Google News for the term, "copyright" returns 47,188 results for the past day, with the top stories all related to legal action over allegations of copyright infringement. We have:
- Copyright Lawsuit Allowed To Proceed Against YouTube
- Gaming industry pleads with MPs for copyright protection.
- Law Lords hear Harum song battle
There are pages and pages of results, all with a common theme - copyright holders (usually not the creators of the work), multinational mega-businesses, courts and lawyers all arguing over what rights are held, by whom, and how courts of law should be interpreting the permitted use of whichever work is under dispute. We see business trying to protect its financial interests by lobbying governments to give them more rights. We see allegations of bias, theft and other dishonesty, and governments criticising other governments for perceived failures to enforce IP rights.
What we don't see is news about the artists and other content creators whose rights have been lost to corporate interests, evidence to back up the argument that copyright motivates creativity, or research on how these legal decisions and laws impact on ordinary people.
New Zealand, Ireland, France, South Korea, and a number of other countries have recently become victims of international efforts to punish people suspected of infringing copyright. New Zealand's own S.92A of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008, was not enacted as a result of public pressure, but will come back to bite us after a rewrite. A presumption of "guilt upon accusation" and denial of access to the Internet is being promoted by the Recording Industry. Countries that are party to the proposed international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is deemed to be "top secret" by the US administration, appear to be headed towards the type of copyright enforcement one might expect in totalitarian regimes, but not in Western democracies.
Is this what copyright has come to? A protection of money, not creative rights, which is backed by laws created by governments who bow to industries that grow rich off the work of others, where the value of money means more than the value of individual rights such as the presumption of innocence? If so, I make no apologies for not celebrating copyright today.
I believe in artists rights. I also believe in fairness and equity. As long as copyright continues to be perverted by the powerful few to the detriment of many, World Book & Copyright Day is, for me, a day that is tainted by sadness.
Read more about World Book & Copyright Day
- World Book and Copyright Day at United Nations (includes links to UN copyright information)
- World Book and Copyright Day at UNESCO
- Message of the Director-General of UNESCO on the occasion of World Book and Copyright Day — 23 April 2009
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