Christie, Andrew F. --- "Maximising Permissible Exceptions to Intellectual Property Rights" [2011] ELECD 449; in Kur, Annette; Mizaras, Vytautas (eds), "The Structure of Intellectual Property Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: The Structure of Intellectual Property Law

Editor(s): Kur, Annette; Mizaras, Vytautas

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448766

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: Maximising Permissible Exceptions to Intellectual Property Rights

Author(s): Christie, Andrew F.

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

7. Maximising permissible exceptions
to intellectual property rights
Andrew F. Christie*

1. INTRODUCTION

Exceptions to intellectual property (IP) rights are of fundamental impor-
tance to achieving the policy objectives that justify the grant of IP rights.
To the extent to which an IP right is considered to be `too strong', the way
to `weaken' (or, to better `balance') it is through the use of an exception
to it. It is not surprising, therefore, that much attention has been paid in
recent times by academics and policy-makers to the issue of exceptions,
and in particular to the issue of the extent to which the `three-step test'
in international treaties restricts the ability of national legislatures to
introduce new exceptions to IP rights.1


* Davies Collison Cave Professor of Intellectual Property at the Melbourne
Law School, and Research Associate of the Intellectual Property Research
Institute of Australia (IPRIA), University of Melbourne. This chapter is based on
a presentation by the author at the 2008 Congress of the International Association
for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP),
Munich, 22 July 2008, and describes research that was supported by IPRIA and
by the Australian Research Council through its Linkage Project scheme as part
of the project Cultural Collections, Creators and Copyright: Museums, Galleries,
Libraries and Archives and Australia's Digital Heritage (Andrew Kenyon and
Andrew Christie, LP0669566).
1 The following is a selective, but representative, sample of the more recent

literature: Geiger, C., `From Berne to National Law, ...