Copyright Agency attends the IFRRO World Congress in Japan
November 28, 2017
Last month, the Copyright Agency’s CEO Adam Suckling attended the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO) World Congress in Tokyo.
Apart from participating in the Congress, the trip was an opportunity for the Copyright Agency to share information with Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, which is considering introducing an educational licensing scheme similar to Australia’s.
Copyright Agency contributed to several key sessions at the Congress including ‘Fake News & Framing: No Alternative Facts’, the Legal Issues Forum and the Asia Pacific Committee Meeting.
Adam Suckling moderated a panel that included Angela Mills Wade (Executive Director of the European Publishers Council), Jonathan Lockwood (Corporate Counsel, Getty Images) and Brett Miller (Economy Team Leader for Japan/Korea, Bloomberg News), discussing fake news, the legal implications of ‘framing’ – i.e. content that is presented to look as though it is original to a website, but is in fact sourced from another – and the potential consequences for rightsholders.
Other highlights included keynote speeches from YS Chi, President of Elsevier and Kevin Fitzgerald, Acting Director Copyright Infrastructure Division at WIPO, who both acknowledged the intrinsic value of copyright and creative industries while focusing on the impact of new technologies and the need to embrace transformation in the digital age.
Mr Fitzgerald noted that a key outtake from the 2016 WIPO Conference on the Global Digital Content Market was that creative industries are not in decline. “Successful business models must give customers the type of content they want, in the format and at the time they want it, rather than in ways which are convenient to providers,” he said.
L – R: Brett Miller, Jonathan Lockwood, Angela Mills Wade and Adam Suckling