New Australian Prime Minister Takes Copyright Issues Away From Hollywood's Buddy George Brandis

from the good-move dept

We've written a bunch about George Brandis, the Australian Attorney General, who has been at the forefront of passing new copyright laws that were basically a Hollywood wish list. That wasn't a huge surprise given that Brandis had no problem hanging out with Hollywood lobbyists, but had no interest at all in talking to consumer groups (that links to a video in which Senator Scott Ludlam asks Brandis if he met with consumer advocates, and Brandis refuses to answer). Brandis is also terrible on surveillance, but that's another discussion for another day.

Another Australian Parliament Member who worked heavily on copyright issues was Malcolm Turnbull. In fact, the recent copyright law came from both of them. However, despite working on the issue together, it has often appeared that the two were out of step with one another. And while Turnbull wasn't great, he at least recognized that things weren't quite so black and white as Brandis makes them out to be.

As you may have heard last week, in a surprise move, Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister of Australia. And, in setting up his new cabinet he has taken copyright issues away from Brandis entirely (though still leaving him as Attorney General).

In that link above, where Senator Ludlam grilled Brandis about who informed his beliefs about copyright law, Brandis kept insisting that stricter copyright enforcement was important for artists and that's who he was supporting and that they supported his position on this. And yet, just last week it was famed musician/author Nick Cave who was publicly demanding that Turnbull dump Brandis from the "arts" beat, and now that it's happened lots of artists appear to be quite pleased saying that Brandis did not understand the arts community. That link includes tweets from creators expressing delight over the arts portfolio being taken from Brandis. Of course, most of their direct concern appears to be about funding for the arts, rather than copyright issues, but it does say something that he always claimed he was advocating for artists and yet they seem quite happy to see him go.

Filed Under: arts, australia, copyright, george brandis, malcolm turnbull, scott ludlam