The rule of law, the public interest and the management of natural resources in Australia

The statutory arrangements for the management of natural resources in Australia confer powers of decision-making upon government agencies and, at the same time, restrict how these powers are to be exercised by reference either to stated criteria or in some instances to the public interest. These restrictions perform different functions according to their structure, form and language: for example they may be in the form of jurisdictional, deliberative or purposive rules. This article reviews how the offshore resources legislation of the Commonwealth and some examples of the onshore resources legislation of Queensland address the functions performed by the public interest in determining whether there is compliance with the principle of the rule of law.

Rediscovering law students as citizens: Critical thinking and the public value of legal education

In a series of publications over the last decade, Australian National University Professor Margaret Thornton has documented a disturbing change in the nature of legal education. This body of work culminates in a recently published book based on interviews with 145 legal academics in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada. In it, Thornton describes a feeling of widespread unease among legal academics that society, government, university administrators and students themselves are moving away from viewing legal education as a public good which benefits both students and society. Instead, legal education is increasingly being viewed as a purely private good, for consumption by the student in the quest for individual career enhancement.

A values analysis of attitudes towards the use of law to prevent obesity: How might these values inform public health law theory and practice?

This thesis asks whether values, like government duty, individual responsibility, community and social justice, influence the way that scholars and research participants think about the use of law to prevent obesity. It explores the way participants speak about values when expressing their support for or against a variety of government regulatory interventions, including taxation, food labelling reforms and advertising restrictions. This research contributes to our understanding of theories of public health law and public health ethics. The qualitative findings also have implications for policy development, in advocating for a variety of government interventions to prevent obesity.

A crowning glory: Patent law and public health

Australian patent law reforms are critical to ensuring Australians have access to vital health-care services and technologies and that people in developing countries have access to affordable, life-saving medicines...

Crystal palaces: Copyright law and public architecture

This paper investigates copyright law and public architecture in the context of cultural institutions of Australia. Part 1 examines the case of the Sydney Opera House to illustrate the past position of architects in respect of copyright law. It goes onto consider the framework laid down by the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth) to resolve copyright disputes over moral rights and architecture. Part 2 considers the argument over the proposed renovations to the National Gallery of Australia between Dr Brian Kennedy and the original architect Colin Madigan. Part 3 finally deals with the allegations that Ashton Raggatt McDougall, the architects of the National Museum of Australia, plagiarised the designs of Daniel Libeskind for the Jewish Berlin Museum.

Pacific Rim treaty threatens public health: Patent law and medical procedures

Doctors, surgeons, and physicians around the Pacific Rim should be concerned by the proposals revealed by WikiLeaks in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). One of the most controversial features of the TPP is the proposal to provide for patent protection in respect of medical procedures. As Public Citizen observed, ‘Health providers, including surgeons, could be liable for the methods they use to treat patients.’ The civil society group noted: ‘Essentially, except for when a surgeon uses her bare hands, surgical methods would be patentable under the U.S. proposal.’ The TPP takes a broad approach to patents and medicine; lacks appropriate safeguards; and fails to address larger questions about equity, development, and human rights. Such a measure could result in greater litigation against medical professionals; barriers to access to medical procedures for patients; and skyrocketing health costs.

Julia Gillard, Big Pharma, patent law and public health

It takes a lot of bravery for governments to stand up to big business. But the Gillard government has shown a lot of guts during its tenure. It stood up to Big Tobacco in the battle over plain packaging of tobacco products and has defended individuals and families affected by asbestos. It took on Big Oil in its Clean Energy Future reforms and stood up to the resource barons with the mining tax. The government is now considering Big Pharma - the pharmaceutical industry and their patents – and has launched several inquiries into patent law and pharmaceutical drugs...

Report to the Government 2.0 Taskforce : Project 4 - Copyright Law and Intellectual Property

This report is the primary output of Project 4: Copyright and Intellectual Property, the aim of which was to produce a report considering how greater access to and use of government information could be achieved within the scope of the current copyright law. In our submission for Project 4, we undertook to address: •the policy rationales underlying copyright and how they apply in the context of materials owned, held and used by government; • the recommendations of the Copyright Law Review Committee (CLRC) in its 2005 report on Crown copyright; • the legislative and regulatory barriers to information sharing in key domains, including where legal impediments such as copyright have been relied upon (whether rightly or wrongly) to justify a refusal to provide access to government data; • copyright licensing models appropriate to government materials and examples of licensing initiatives in Australia and other relevant jurisdictions; and • issues specific to the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (“GLAM”) sector, including management of copyright in legacy materials and “orphan” works. In addressing these areas, we analysed the submissions received in response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce Issues Paper, consulted with members of the Task Force as well as several key stakeholders and considered the comments posted on the Task Force’s blog. This Project Report sets out our findings on the above issues. It puts forward recommendations for consideration by the Government 2.0 Task Force on steps that can be taken to ensure that copyright and intellectual property promote access to and use of government information.

Where the bloody hell does parody fit in Australian copyright law?

This article examines the role of the recently introduced fair dealing exception for the purposes of parody and satire in Australian copyright law. Parody and satire, while central to Australian expression, pose a substantial challenge for copyright policy. The law is asked to strike a delicate balance between an author’s right to exploit their work, the interests of the public in stimulating free speech and critical discussion, the rights of artists who rely on existing material in creating their own expression, and the rights of all artists in their reputation and the integrity of their works. This article highlights the difficulty parodists and satirists have historically faced in Australia and examines the potential of the new fair dealing exceptions to relieve this difficulty. This article concludes that the new exceptions have the potential, if read broadly, not only to bridge the gap between humorous and non-humorous criticism, but also to allow for the use of copyright material to critique figures other than the copyright owner or author, extending to society generally. This article will argue that the new exceptions should be read broadly to further this important policy goal while also being limited in their application so as to prevent mere substitutable uses of copyright material. To achieve these twin goals, I suggest that the primary indication of fairness of an unlicensed parody should be whether or not it adds significant new expression so as not to be substitutable for the original work.

Elliptic curves, group law, and efficient computation

This thesis is about the derivation of the addition law on an arbitrary elliptic curve and efficiently adding points on this elliptic curve using the derived addition law. The outcomes of this research guarantee practical speedups in higher level operations which depend on point additions. In particular, the contributions immediately find applications in cryptology. Mastered by the 19th century mathematicians, the study of the theory of elliptic curves has been active for decades. Elliptic curves over finite fields made their way into public key cryptography in late 1980’s with independent proposals by Miller [Mil86] and Koblitz [Kob87]. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), following Miller’s and Koblitz’s proposals, employs the group of rational points on an elliptic curve in building discrete logarithm based public key cryptosystems. Starting from late 1990’s, the emergence of the ECC market has boosted the research in computational aspects of elliptic curves. This thesis falls into this same area of research where the main aim is to speed up the additions of rational points on an arbitrary elliptic curve (over a field of large characteristic). The outcomes of this work can be used to speed up applications which are based on elliptic curves, including cryptographic applications in ECC. The aforementioned goals of this thesis are achieved in five main steps. As the first step, this thesis brings together several algebraic tools in order to derive the unique group law of an elliptic curve. This step also includes an investigation of recent computer algebra packages relating to their capabilities. Although the group law is unique, its evaluation can be performed using abundant (in fact infinitely many) formulae. As the second step, this thesis progresses the finding of the best formulae for efficient addition of points. In the third step, the group law is stated explicitly by handling all possible summands. The fourth step presents the algorithms to be used for efficient point additions. In the fifth and final step, optimized software implementations of the proposed algorithms are presented in order to show that theoretical speedups of step four can be practically obtained. In each of the five steps, this thesis focuses on five forms of elliptic curves over finite fields of large characteristic. A list of these forms and their defining equations are given as follows: (a) Short Weierstrass form, y2 = x3 + ax + b, (b) Extended Jacobi quartic form, y2 = dx4 + 2ax2 + 1, (c) Twisted Hessian form, ax3 + y3 + 1 = dxy, (d) Twisted Edwards form, ax2 + y2 = 1 + dx2y2, (e) Twisted Jacobi intersection form, bs2 + c2 = 1, as2 + d2 = 1, These forms are the most promising candidates for efficient computations and thus considered in this work. Nevertheless, the methods employed in this thesis are capable of handling arbitrary elliptic curves. From a high level point of view, the following outcomes are achieved in this thesis. - Related literature results are brought together and further revisited. For most of the cases several missed formulae, algorithms, and efficient point representations are discovered. - Analogies are made among all studied forms. For instance, it is shown that two sets of affine addition formulae are sufficient to cover all possible affine inputs as long as the output is also an affine point in any of these forms. In the literature, many special cases, especially interactions with points at infinity were omitted from discussion. This thesis handles all of the possibilities. - Several new point doubling/addition formulae and algorithms are introduced, which are more efficient than the existing alternatives in the literature. Most notably, the speed of extended Jacobi quartic, twisted Edwards, and Jacobi intersection forms are improved. New unified addition formulae are proposed for short Weierstrass form. New coordinate systems are studied for the first time. - An optimized implementation is developed using a combination of generic x86-64 assembly instructions and the plain C language. The practical advantages of the proposed algorithms are supported by computer experiments. - All formulae, presented in the body of this thesis, are checked for correctness using computer algebra scripts together with details on register allocations.

Health law : scope, sources and forces

• For the purposes of this chapter, “health law” encapsulates regulation of the medical and health professions, the administration of health services and the maintenance of public health to the extent that it is connected to the provision of health services. • There are diverging views as to whether health law can be regarded as a discrete “area of law”. • Health law draws on other areas of law such as tort law, criminal law and family law. It is also draws upon other disciplines, most notably medical and health ethics. • Social and economic forces have influenced the development and direction of health law, and these forces may become even more influential as the century develops. • The increasingly globalised world has implications for Australia’s health systems and raises questions and creates commitments in respect of the international community. • Technological developments, including in respect of treatment, diagnosis and information management, create ongoing challenges for health law. • Patient rights, human rights and consumerism are increasingly key drivers in the development of health law. • Health law is significant to contemporary Australian society because of the gravity of the topics that fall within its ambit, its social relevance to so many aspects of human existence and endeavour, the important role it plays in protecting the vulnerable, and the extent to which it engages with fundamental principles of justice.

Safety-restraint use rate as function of law enforcement and other factors : preliminary analysis

Persistent use of safety restraints prevents deaths and reduces the severity and number of injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes. However, safety-restraint use rates in the United States have been below those of other nations with safety-restraint enforcement laws. With a better understanding of the relationship between safety-restraint law enforcement and safety-restraint use, programs can be implemented to decrease the number of deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes. Does safety-restraint use increase as enforcement increases? Do motorists increase their safety-restraint use in response to the general presence of law enforcement or to targeted law enforcement efforts? Does a relationship between enforcement and restraint use exist at the countywide level? A logistic regression model was estimated by using county-level safety-restraint use data and traffic citation statistics collected in 13 counties within the state of Florida in 1997. The model results suggest that safety-restraint use is positively correlated with enforcement intensity, is negatively correlated with safety-restraint enforcement coverage (in lanemiles of enforcement coverage), and is greater in urban than rural areas. The quantification of these relationships may assist Florida and other law enforcement agencies in raising safety-restraint use rates by allocating limited funds more efficiently either by allocating additional time for enforcement activities of the existing force or by increasing enforcement staff. In addition, the research supports a commonsense notion that enforcement activities do result in behavioral response.

Digital constitutionalism and the role of the rule of law in the governance of virtual communities

This project proposes a new conceptual framework for the regulation of social networks and virtual communities. By applying a model based upon the rule of law, this thesis addresses the growing tensions that revolve around the public use of private networks. This research examines the shortcomings of traditional contractual governance models and cyberlaw theory and provides a reconstituted approach that will allow public constitutional-type interests to be recognised in the interpretation and enforcement of contractual doctrine.

Female genital mutilation : Australian law, policy and practical challenges for doctors

As long ago as 1994, the Family Law Council accepted it was likely that female genital mutilation (FGM) was being conducted in Australia. In 2010, doctors and hospitals reported that it is being conducted and that they are seeing female patients who have experienced FGM. It is impossible to obtain precise data about the extent to which it is performed in Australia, but data indicates that FGM is a relevant issue for Australian medical practitioners. The medical profession has an interest in this topic because its members may be asked to conduct FGM, advise those considering it, or treat female patients with effects from the practice. This article provides a background on the practice of FGM, explains the relevant Australian law, considers whether the current legal prohibition on FGM is justified, and discusses the practical challenges facing individual practitioners and the profession. To inform further discussions about methods of responding to demand for FGM, reference is made to strategies being promoted in African nations to abolish this cultural practice.

Standardisation and patent ambush : potential liability under Australian competition law

This article examines the problem of patent ambush in standard setting, where patent owners are sometimes able to capture industry standards in order to secure monopoly power and windfall profits. Because standardisation generally introduces high switching costs, patent ambush can impose significant costs on downstream manufacturers and consumers and drastically reduce the efficiency gains of standardisation.This article considers how Australian competition law is likely to apply to patent ambush both in the development of a standard (through misrepresenting the existence of an essential patent) and after a standard is implemented (through refusing to license an essential patented technology either at all or on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms). This article suggests that non-disclosure of patent interests is unlikely to restrained by Part IV of the Trade Practices Act (TPA), and refusals to license are only likely to be restrained if the refusal involves leveraging or exclusive dealing. By contrast, Standard Setting Organisations (SSOs) which seek to limit this behaviour through private ordering may face considerable scrutiny under the new cartel provisions of the TPA. This article concludes that SSOs may be best advised to implement administrative measures to prevent patent hold-up, such as reviewing which patents are essential for the implementation of a standard, asking patent holders to make their licence conditions public to promote transparency, and establishing forums where patent licensees can complain about licence terms that they consider to be unreasonable or discriminatory. Additionally, the ACCC may play a role in authorising SSO policies that could otherwise breach the new cartel provisions, but which have the practical effect of promoting competition in the standards setting environment.