A Reimagined Approach to Copyright Enforcement from a Regulator's Perspective

This paper is part of an international collaborative project led by Rebecca Giblin & Kimberlee Weatherall. The premise of the project is this: what if we could start with a blank slate, and write ourselves a brand new copyright system? If we could design a law, from scratch, to encourage creativity, remunerate and support creators, and ensure broad access to new knowledge and culture, in short, if we could draw up a new copyright law that genuinely furthered the public interest, what might it look like? Would we opt for radical overhaul? Or would we keep our current fundamentals? What parts of the system would we jettison? What would we keep? The book will be published open access via ANU Press in 2016.This paper – a subpart of the broader project – explores some ideas for breaking away from current unproductive thinking on enforcement, drawing on regulatory theory and research in psychology around the factors that motivate compliance with the law. At its heart lies a thought experiment: what if we created a public copyright regulator, tasked with using a fixed pool of public resources to attempt to secure widespread observance of copyright principles? How would such a regulator approach their task, and what tools would they need? Perhaps the insights of regulatory theory can help us break out of a cycle of deterrence failure and escalation, and move towards a positive vision where enforcement contributes to both creators' and society's goals