Peter Gallagher

“On the envi­ron­ment, one other thing as well — today the Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter will be releas­ing a new report on the impact of cli­mate change on drought. We asked some time ago for the CSIRO and Bureau of Mete­o­rol­ogy to advise us how do we deal with excep­tional cir­cum­stances drought arrange­ments into the future. They’ve now pre­sented us with a report and the find­ings are again very dis­turb­ing. What they say in two short points is this, and this will come out later today – firstly that when it comes to excep­tional or extreme drought, excep­tion­ally high tem­per­a­tures, the his­tor­i­cal assump­tion that this occurred once every 20 years has now been revised down to between every one and two years, that’s the first point.

Sec­ondly, with excep­tional cir­cum­stances drought con­di­tions, under sce­nar­ios within it, that that will occur twice as often, and with twice the area of droughted parts of Aus­tralia included. Now this is a seri­ous revi­sion of the impact of cli­mate change on drought and the Agri­cul­tural Min­is­ter will make that clear in the report that he releases later today, again on cli­mate change.”  extract from: Prime Min­is­ter of Aus­tralia — Inter­view with Bar­rie Cas­sidy, ABC Insid­ers  (empha­sis added)

It would be dif­fi­cult to think of a more author­i­ta­tive state­ment of acute pub­lic inter­est in this issue. When the Prime Min­is­ter uses terms such as ‘very dis­turb­ing’ and ’ seri­ous revi­sion of the impact of cli­mate change’ and talks of the nec­es­sary revi­sion of a pro­gram bud­geted this year at about one bil­lion dol­lars, we can con­fi­dently say that this is a mat­ter of the high­est pub­lic inter­est.

In fact, these are the exactly the cir­cum­stances in which intel­lec­tual prop­erty laws are intended to tilt the bal­ance toward the exten­sion of research and edu­ca­tion in the pub­lic interest.

“The pri­mary pur­pose of copy­right is to pro­vide an incen­tive for peo­ple to pro­duce new works for the ben­e­fit of soci­ety as a whole. The incen­tive is cre­ated by the oppor­tu­nity to be paid when other peo­ple use and dis­sem­i­nate those works. Copy­right can also reward peo­ple who cre­ate works with­out expect­ing pay­ment, when their works end up being used by others.The government-appointed com­mit­tee whose report led to the intro­duc­tion of Australia’s cur­rent Copy­right Act said:

The pri­mary end of the law on this sub­ject is to give to the author of a cre­ative work his just reward for the ben­e­fit he has bestowed on the com­mu­nity and also to encour­age the mak­ing of fur­ther cre­ative works.

In copy­right law, the objec­tive of encour­ag­ing the cre­ation of new works is bal­anced by the objec­tive of mak­ing mate­r­ial avail­able for socially desir­able pur­poses such as research and edu­ca­tion.”  extract from: Copy­right pur­poses and sources—Australian Copy­right Coun­cil  (empha­sis added)

Here’s some­thing to be truly dis­turbed by: a pub­licly funded insti­tu­tion, such as CSIRO, ded­i­cated to knowl­edge and tech­nol­ogy rely­ing on the IP laws to hide from crit­i­cal review of a mat­ter of vital pub­lic inter­est. What pri­vate inter­est (in data pro­tec­tion) can pos­si­bly out­weigh the pub­lic inter­est in this case? Where is the bal­ance that IP laws are sup­posed to protect?

CSIRO owes us a bet­ter explanation.