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as revised in 1994.are protected under the Trade-marks Act and the Copyright Act", maintaining Crown copyright long after the normal 50-year period. One example is where the "Arms of Canada as designed in 1921 and revised in 1957. Subsequently, Crown copyright can be, in certain cases, "said to be perpetual.and not to lapse through non-use or non-assertion", and that a "right to certain works by prerogative amounts to a perpetual term of copyright protection". Crown copyright covers all works that are "prepared or published by or under the direction or control of Her Majesty or any government department." In this way, "work produced by government departments, whether published or unpublished, may be protected either permanently or at the whim of the Crown". This prerogative is referenced at the outset of section 12 of the Copyright Act, which states that this section is made "Without prejudice to any rights or privileges of the Crown". Canadian Crown copyright is based on the concept of royal prerogative and "is not subject to the usual statutory copyright term". For Crown copyright however, there is a slight difference. Normally, copyright in Canada "exists for the life of the author/creator, the remainder of the calendar year in which he is deceased, plus fifty years after the end of that calendar year". In 2009, the Victorian Government used Crown copyright to deny public access to data about the Black Saturday bushfires. The 2005 report issued by Australia's Copyright Law Review Committee supports a repeal of Crown copyright provisions, which would "respect statutory provisions respecting employer ownership of works authored by employees and contractual arrangements for assigning copyright in commissioned works." By 2009, there were recommendations to change Crown copyright, allowing Crown copyrighted works to be licensed and given open access. For example, a previously unpublished short story, upon being published in a government work, would cease to belong to the author and would instead become Crown copyright, denying the author any future royalties or rights to it. In particular, the committee was "emphatic" that the Crown should lose its unique position of gaining copyright over material whenever it is the first publisher of such material. The chief recommendation was to end the distinction between the Crown and other copyright holders. first published in Australia by or under the direction or control of that government.Ĭopyright in such copyright material subsists until 50 years after the calendar year in which the material is made (s. 180).Ĭopyright in legislation and court or tribunal judgments, orders or awards is not infringed by making one copy of the whole of a work or part of it, provided the copy is not sold for a price that exceeds the actual costs of copying (s. 182A(3)).Īn extensive review was carried out in 2004 and the findings were published in 2005 in the Copyright Law Review Committee's report.made by or under the direction or control of that government, or.Sections 176(2) and 177 of the Act provide that the Australian Government or a government of an Australian state or territory owns copyright in an original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work: The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) is the single Act mandating copyright policy for government and non-government works in Australia. There are some considerations being made in Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand regarding the "reuse of Crown-copyrighted material, through new licences". There are therefore no common regulations that apply to all or a number of those countries. Each Commonwealth realm has its own Crown copyright regulations. government departments and (generally) state entities. It subsists in works of the governments of some Commonwealth realms and provides special copyright rules for the Crown, i.e. Copyright protection used by some Commonwealth realmsĬrown copyright is a type of copyright protection.