IP: KCE

A new book has been launched by IP:KCE current and former researchers along with our Chinese partners. “Copyright law, digital content and the Internet in the Asia-Pacific” (Editors: Brian Fitzgerald, Fuping Gao, Damien O’Brien and Sampsung Xiaoxiang Shi) provides a unique insight into the key issues facing copyright law and digital content policy in a networked information world. It emanates from a landmark conference - The First International Forum on the Content Industry and Intellectual Property - organised by Queensland University of Technology (QUT), The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) and East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL) in Shanghai in 2007.

The book features chapters from a wide range of experts in their respective fields from across the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore. Some of the areas examined include the new digital environment, digital content policy, the networked information economy, copyright law and new media. The book provides a timely and scholarly appraisal of the legal and policy considerations facing anyone trying to regulate, sponsor or utilise the vast array of new media and content platforms now available.

The book is published by Sydney University Press and can be purchased from their website.

The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law project is hosting an international conference on Wednesday 24 September-Thursday 25 September 2008, with Post-Conference Workshops on Friday 26 September at Stamford Plaza, Brisbane.

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) along with many other institutions throughout the world has pioneered the establishment of management practices and the necessary infrastructure to promote access and innovation. This landmark conference will bring together experts from Australia and around the world to speak on a range of topics such as:

• Evolving publishing models • Repository management
• eResearch • Policy development
• Data access and reuse • Legal and technical issues

Keynote speakers and distinguished commentators include:

John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons
Alma Swan, Founder of Key Perspectives: Consultants to the scholarly information industry
Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research
Dr Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company
Professor Mary O’Kane, Director and Executive Chairman of Mary O’Kane & Associates Pty Ltd
Dr Peter Crossman, Assistant Under Treasurer (OESR) and Government Statistician
Stevan Harnad, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Dr Richard Jefferson, CEO & Founder, CAMBIA and the BiOS Initiative
Professor Arun Sharma, DVC QUT Research and Commercialisation
Professor Tom Cochrane, DVC QUT Division of Technology, Information and Learning Support
Professor Brian Fitzgerald, OAK Law Project and QUT Law Faculty
Dr Rhys Francis, Executive Director, Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council
Maarten Wilbers, Deputy Legal Counsel, CERN Legal Services
Together with Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Professor Paul Roe, Professor Bernard Pailthorpe, Colin Steele, Roger Clarke, John Houghton and Professor Arthur Sale.

To register or for more information, including the conference program, visit the official website www.oar2008.qut.edu.au

An opinion piece by Professor Fitzgerald, entitled “It’s vital to sort out ownership of ideas” appeared in the Higher Education Section of The Australian newspaper on Wednesday February 27.

Professor Fitgerald warns that innovation could suffer unless we bring copyright law into the 21st century.

“In an increasingly digital, communicative and networked environment, we need to manage copyright strategically, as it is critical to the success and competitiveness of Australia as a laboratory for innovation. That will mean changing the law to some extent but, more significantly and less controversially, it will mean reconstructing some of the key policies around information management in the publicly funded sector,” writes Professor Fitzgerald.

The full article is available online here.

OAK Law Project Manager Scott Kiel-Chisholm and OAK Law Researcher Dr Anne Fitzgerald have given a presentation at The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Open Access Collections. As part of the one day workshop on the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing for Australian universities held on Thursday, February 14, 2008 at Customs House in Brisbane, Dr Fitzgerald and Mr Kiel-Chisholm addressed the topic ‘Managing Copyright for Open Access’.

The slides from the presentation can be accessed here.

The APSR Project aims to establish a centre of excellence for the management of scholarly assets in digital format.

APSR works closely with research communities, information professionals, technical staff, and higher education policy makers on a series of development projects, surveys, publications, seminars, and training workshops. The Partnership aims to help create the systems required for managing data and information in a research environment and simultaneously to increase the capability of Australian researchers to do so.

QUT has co-sponsored two international summits on Open Access to Public Sector Information (PSI), the first in Brisbane on Tuesday 4th March and the second in Canberra on Thursday 6th March. The presentation powerpoints for the Canberra summit can be viewed here.

In a world where access to knowledge has become a key driver of social, cultural and economic innovation governments throughout the world have begun to focus on how they might provide better access to the publicily funded information resources. This raises questions of information management, pricing and economic modelling and legal compliance. The summit brought together leading experts from around the world and Australia working on projects in the area to provide and overview of the current policy development and what this means for Australian governments.

Thank you to CRC-SI, QLD Goverment and Queensland Spatial Information Council who co-sponsored the Brisbane summit and to CRC-SI and Office of Spatial Data Management for their co-sponsorship of the Canberra summit.

Official flyers with details of the Agenda: Canberra Brisbane

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (CCi) is delighted to announce a major international conference. The theme is Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons. The conference will be held in Brisbane, Australia in June 2008.

The CCi is Australia’s premier centre for research into the convergence of cultural and economic values.

It specializes in research that explores enterprise and innovation along the dynamic boundary between market and non-market, cultural and economic, commercial and community. It is especially interested in the development of social network markets both digital and community-based.

It has a strong interdisciplinary commitment, both disciplinary (linking research in creative innovation and digital media with law, education, business and IT) and applied (linking creative practitioners with business leaders, policymakers and scholars).

This conference showcases some of the CCi’s own research projects, and welcomes papers from academic, business, creative or public policy specialists on any aspect of value-creation in the context of creative industries and innovation.

Call for papers
Detailed abstracts (up to 500 words) for papers are now called for.
Deadline is March 31 2008. Abstracts will be refereed. We will be considering selected papers for publication (subject to separate negotiation)

Please send abstracts to Jodie Rapley (CCi coordinator) at: j.rapley@qut.edu.au before March 30 2008

General Enquiries
For all general enquiries about this event, please contact Jodie Rapley, CCi Coordinator j.rapley@qut.edu.au

More Information

When: 14 - 15 February

Where: QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane

There are many uncertainties involved in the regulation of online games, including jurisdictional issues, the legitimacy of secondary markets, rights and responsibilities of modders and machinima creators, struggles over the use and reuse of IP, the legitimacy or legality of certain terms in EULAs and TOS, the status of ephemeral and user-created content with classification boards and internet regulators, governance in-game and exclusion policies, privacy and data mining and more.

This symposium will offer a chance to discuss the issues of game governance, from code through to government policy, and to move towards finding an integrated set of solutions to the current problems. Bringing together people from creative industries, media studies, law, business and IT faculties, industry, government and player groups, the emphasis will be on exploring and suggesting alternatives to current practices.

Keynote speakers include:

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property matters. In that role, he has represented programmers, technology innovators, and individuals in a variety of copyright and trademark litigation, including MGM v. Grokster, decided by the Supreme Court in 2005. He is also involved in EFF's efforts to educate policy-makers regarding the proper balance between intellectual property protection and the public interest in fair use, free expression, and innovation. Before joining EFF, Fred was a visiting researcher with the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and an associate with the international law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP. He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, ABC's Good Morning America, and Fox News O'Reilly Factor and has been widely quoted in a variety of national publications. Fred has an A.B. from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Please email Sal Humphreys at s.humphreys@qut.edu.au to register for the event.

For more information visit www.cci.edu.au/programs/gamesandlaw

COMMUNIA: The European Thematic Network on the digital public domain

When: Wednesday 13 February, 12:30 - 2pm

Where: Gibson Room (Room 1064), Z Block, Gardens Point Campus.

Juan Carlos De Martin, Associate Professor at the Information Engineering School of the Politecnico di. Previously, prof. De Martin spent -besides several years with the National Research Council of Italy- two years as Visiting Scholar at the University of California, and two years in Dallas as Texas Instruments member of technical staff and as adjunct professor at the University of Texas. His research activities are focused on multimedia processing and transmission. He is also actively involved in investigating the effects of digital technologies and Internet on society. In that direction, he has been following the Creative Commons Italy project since 2003, he brought to Italy and co-organized the Harvard Law School Internet Law Program, and founded in November 2006 the NEXA Center for Internet and Society of the Politecnico di Torino (http://nexa.polito.it). Since 1 September 2007, Dr De Martin is the Coordinator of COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the digital public domain (http://communia-project.eu). De Martin is a member of IEEE and the author or co-author of over seventy international scientific publications.

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics. Funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus framework, the 3-year long project expects to provide policy guidelines that will help each stakeholder involved - public and private, from the local to the European and global level. COMMUNIA also plans to build strategic relationships with other non-European countries (starting with the United States and Brazil, where two COMMUNIA members are located) in which similar policy discussions are currently underway.

RSVP to e.bledsoe@creativecommons.org.au

In today’s ever-changing world, open access to knowledge is increasingly important. The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project hosted at QUT and funded by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations aims to ensure that every day citizens through to top-end researchers can legally and efficiently share knowledge across domains and across the world.

The OAK Law Project has developed a web-enabled database containing information about publishing agreements and publishers’ open access policies and practices and publishing agreements - The OAK List. This database is accessible to everyone, including publishers, authors, copyright administrators and repository managers, both in Australia and overseas. The OAK List has been developed to be interoperable with the RoMEO/SHERPA database.

Establishing an effective open access environment is critical to promoting the impact and quality of research in a networked world. The OAK List will assist academic and scholarly authors to make informed choices about publishing in Australian and overseas journals.

When: 5:00 – 6.30 pm, Thursday 7 February 2008

Where: Owen J Wordsworth (OJW) Room, S Block, QUT Gardens Point, Brisbane, Australia

RSVP by 23 February to t.butkovsky@qut.edu.au

More information visit www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au

photos by Felix42 contra la censura licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike

“The Knowledge Commons”: what is it and why is it important to Australia’s innovation agenda?

In an era of collaborative innovation our ability to access and reuse knowledge has become paramount. This symposium will consider the central role that sharing of knowledge has come to play in the productivity and innovation strategies of a networked world. In doing so it will highlight the function that the law, business and government might play in promoting such strategies.

John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons (International)

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Project Leader OAK Law

When: 5.30 – 7 pm,

Where: : Room B117, B Block, QUT Gardens Point, Brisbane, Queensland.

RSVP by Monday 5 February to t.butkovsky@qut.edu.au