Rebecca Giblin

Dr Rebecca Giblin is a member of Monash University's Law Faculty. During 2011 she was the Kernochan Visiting International Intellectual Property Scholar at Columbia Law School in New York, and in 2013 a Senior Visiting Scholar in residence at Berkeley Law School. As well as being co-editor of What if we could reimagine copyright?, Dr Giblin is the author of Code Wars (Edward Elgar, 2011), and numerous other journal articles, book chapters, law reform submissions and pieces in the popular press. She has been invited to address diverse audiences across Australia and in the US, the UK, Europe, Israel, South Africa, Hong Kong and South Korea. She is currently the lead Chief Investigator of a $680,204 ARC Linkage Project studying the legal and social impacts of library elending. Many of her research papers are available for full text download via SSRN. She tweets on tech law, IP & related issues @rgibli.

What if we could reimagine copyright? »

Edited by: Rebecca Giblin, Kimberlee Weatherall

Publication date: January 2017

What if we could start with a blank slate, and write ourselves a brand new copyright system? What if we could design a law, from scratch, unconstrained by existing treaty obligations, business models and questions of political feasibility? Would we opt for radical overhaul, or would we keep our current fundamentals? Which parts of the system would we jettison? Which would we keep? In short, what might a copyright system designed to further the public interest in the current legal and sociological environment actually look like? Taking this thought experiment as their starting point, the leading international thinkers represented in this collection reconsider copyright’s fundamental questions: the subject matter that should be protected, the ideal scope and duration of those rights, and how it should be enforced. Tackling the biggest challenges affecting the current law, their essays provocatively explore how the law could better secure to creators the fruits of their labours, ensure better outcomes for the world’s more marginalised populations and solve orphan works. And while the result is a collection of impossible ideas, it also tells us much about what copyright could be – and what prescriptive treaty obligations currently force us to give up. The book shows that, reimagined, copyright could serve creators and the broader public far better than it currently does – and exposes intriguing new directions for achievable reform.

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