Why I am withdrawing from the Australian Delegation to Baltimore
Aug 30, 2012The Australian government has a program that supports Australian delegate’s travel expenses for the purpose of attending international standards meetings and representing Australia. We contribute our own time, but the government reimburses our direct expenses. In exchange, we must represent Australian interests and agreed positions, and we must contribute to a published report about what happened at the meeting. I’ve discussed the usefulness of this report before. As part of the funding conditions, we are required to sign a “Moral Rights Deed Poll” that assigns the copyright of the report to Standards Australia so they can distribute it as they need to - that makes perfect sense, and I’d be fine with that. However this year, I can’t sign it. Not because of what the intent is, but because of what it says.
Warning: what follows is legalese…
The following definitions apply to this Deed:Intellectual Propertymeans all copyright (including rights in relation to phonograms and broadcasts), all rights in relation to inventions (including patent rights), plant varieties, registered and unregistered trade marks (including service marks), registered and unregistered designs, circuit layouts, know-how and all other rights resulting from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields.Materialmeans any documents, records, software (including source and object code), goods, images, information and data stored by any means including all copies and extracts of the same that is:
(a) brought into existence for the purpose of the Multi Schedule Funding Agreement between Standards Australia and the Commonwealth dated 13 September 2011; or
(b) incorporated in, supplied or required to be supplied along with the material described in (a);
that is included in any:
- Project Plan Report;
- Progress Report;
- Report from ISO or HL7 International Standards Meetings; or
- Final Report;
prepared in relation to the activities of IT-014.
and:
The Author assigns to Standards Australia all Intellectual Property rights in the Material, including present and future copyright, whether created by the Author individually or as part of a group, throughout the world.
So what this actually says is that the author (me) assigns to Standards Australia all copyright, all rights, all trademarks, know-how and all other rights to anything in the report. Not just original contributions to the report (with which I’d be perfectly happy), but any material incorporated, or required to be supplied with it. (How can that not include the extensive material on the web linked from the report?)
I **can’t** sign this. The only things I produce or deal with in my business is intellectual property. The meeting report needs to cover much of what I do, and has, in the past, quoted liberally from all sorts of HL7 and other content, including things that I own or have owned (the content on my b. I can’t sign a document that creates uncertainty - in a legal sense - over these things.
Even if this is not legally enforceable (we can hardly assign the rights to trademarks like HL7, Microsoft, etc to Standards Australia), what do I do when I later have to make a declaration that there is no question of ownership over something?
Other people have signed it - either they don’t read it at all, or they think that since the full provisions are not enforceable, they’re happy to sign. Some people think I’m worrying over nothing - that these things are not going to be enforced anyway, since what the agreement actually says is not what is intended (which is clearly the case). But I just can’t be so willing. Standards Australia tell me that I’m the only one with a problem - and I have signed the previous ones willingly (I didn’t know then what I know now, nor did I have so much to lose then). I asked for the agreement to explicitly exclude material that is incorporated with attribution, or that is pre-existing (though that doesn’t really cover the issue), but for procedural reasons, it’s not possible to change the agreement (Standards Australia and DOHA have a signed contract that includes the agreement, so they can’t change it).
So I’m afraid that I’m going to withdraw from the Australian delegation. I hope this doesn’t impact on my working relationship with Standards Australia - they’ve really tried hard to accommodate my concerns, but they are bound by their own agreements with DOHA.
p.s. I’m still going to be in Baltimore.