1. The value of Australia’s copyright public domain

1.1 Introduction: What do these innovations have in common?

A set of examples follow. They all involve valuable contributions to Australian innovation in the area of information goods. They all involve copyright works in which various parties have continuing proprietary (copyright) interests. But they also involve the public (or classes of the public) having rights to use those works in ways that involve some of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. In this article, as discussed in Part 2, I use the expression “public domain” in the expansive sense of encompassing all “public rights” in copyright. “Public rights” are all those aspects of copyright law and practice that are important in determining the ability of the public (or a significant class of the public) to use works without obtaining a licence on terms set (and changeable) by the copyright owner.

The Creative Commons slogan “Some Rights Reserved” sums up rather well the way in which the intellectual goods in the following examples combine proprietary and non-proprietary elements. However, most of the examples of what I will call “the public domain” do not involve the use of Creative Commons licences.

Read more: National and International Dimensions of Copyright’s Public Domain (An Australian Case Study)

In light of considerable interest in the term “neo‐liberalism”, its historical origins, and its uses and misuses – including its use by Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd – we have decided to get together an informal working group to discuss how the term was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s lectures at the College de France in 1978‐79 have only now been translated and published. In these lectures he traces a history of liberalism as an “art of government”, and its relationship to political economy and to government policy.

In the lectures, Foucault focuses upon the origins of the term “neo‐liberalism” among the Freiberg School of German social thinkers, and its later uses by the Chicago School of American political economists. This is traced to changing ideas about the relationship between the individual, the state, society and economy.

The first meeting will focus upon how the idea of neo‐liberalism was developed in Germany and applied through the “social market economy” in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Later meetings will consider American neo‐liberalism as developed by Milton Freidman, Gary Becker and others, and contrasts between the neo‐liberal “art of government” and alternative approaches. Professor Terry Flew from the Creative Industries Faculty will lead the first discussion.

Read more: The Birth of Biopolitics: Reading Group