Introduction

This chapter examines some of the rights that are closely associated with but not usually seen as part of copyright law. The first section examines the moral rights which are given to creators. This is followed by an examination of the protection given to performers under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The law in this area has undergone a number of recent changes, principally as a result of the Australia–USA Free Trade Agreement 2004 (AUSFTA) which extended the protection to include control over authorised sound recordings of performances, as well as providing moral rights for certain types of performances. Later sections of this chapter consider resale royalty rights, circuit layout rights, and the public and educational lending rights schemes.

Moral rights

One of the recurring themes of twentieth-century Australian copyright law was the question of whether Australia complied with its requirements under the Berne Convention to protect the moral rights of authors. While the Commonwealth government and many others argued that the existing laws of defamation and passing off provided adequate protection, creators and commentators continually expressed their dissatisfaction with the level of protection afforded by Australian law. After nearly seventy years of debate, the government capitulated in 2000 and admitted that the existing laws were ‘fragmentary and incomplete’. To remedy this deficiency, in December 2000 the government introduced a moral rights legislative scheme into Australian copyright law. A limited regime of moral rights for performers, which is discussed below, was also introduced in 2007.