Have I mentioned yet how much I wish This Week in the House had a RSS feed so I didn’t have to remember to search it every week? Call to lazy web: do scraplers still exist and is there an easy one I can use to generate a feed?

This Week in the House is full of gems about going-ons in Parliament like sitting dates, new bills, etc and is more comprehensive than relying on the newspaper or television media to know what’s happening. This week for example, a Private Member’s Bill was introduced that has been mooted for some time, but I haven’t seen much coverage about it elsewhere:

132.10 (1)A person who desecrates the Australian National Flag by wilfully
destroying or otherwise mutilating the Australian National Flag in
circumstances where a reasonable person would infer that the destruction or
mutilation is intended publicly to express contempt or disrespect for the Flag or
the Australian Nation shall be guilty of an offence. (Protection of the Australian National
Flag (Desecration of the Flag) Bill 2006 [PDF])

hmmmm.

Also introduced on the same day was a Private Member’s Bill for the Artist Resale Rights Bill 2006 [PDF]. This is of interest to librarians because there are of course many art libraries that acquire works and many other types of libraries buy art as part of their collecting activity. For example, the State Library of NSW buys many significant Australian artworks at auction. McMullan said such a Bill would [PDF]:

“This bill, if it were to be implemented, would give to
visual artists equivalent rights to those enjoyed by authors
and musicians—the right to receive a small proportion,
up to four per cent, of the wealth which their
skill and imagination creates. In other words, it would
reward creativity, which is what every modern economy
needs to do. It would be fair, culturally rewarding
and economically sound. The Minister for the Arts and
Sport knows that this is the right thing to do, but he
cannot get the Attorney-General, who is the minister
responsible, to move.”

In a new era of Creative Commons and copyright reform, I am not quite sure how this would operate. Unlike royalties for music purchase (eg when someone buys a CD) or purchase of a book, this bill is for royalties that would be applied every time an artwork is resold within the period that copyright applies.