The regular claims that superhero stories are a kind of ‘modern mythology’ almost never account for the fact that these are corporate-owned characters, fiercely protected. In 2014, DC Entertainment refused at first to let the Superman logo be used on the gravestone of a murdered five-year-old boy. The American Bar Association wrote that DC’s ‘aggressive policing’ echoes Batman’s own crime-fighting, and that ‘no one is immune, even deceased children.’

One Sunday night a few weeks ago, I received an email from Podbean informing me my podcast had been taken down in response to a complaint that the content on the first ever episode, back in 2014, infringed on ‘intellectual property rights worldwide’. The complaint had come from AXG House, an ‘automated DCMA take-down service’.

Authors are always put at the centre of Australia’s copyright debates, grounding claims for more rights or fewer exceptions. Despite that, our law has no explicit rights to protect authors in the case of unfair, unclear or outdated contacts. I criticised this state of affairs in the last spring issue of Overland, making a case for Australia finally joining the majority of the world’s nations by granting authors appropriate baseline protections.

Australia’s copyright system can continually be improved. But there are better ways to do it than merely importing a controversially complex copyright approach from the US. Our system needs to be more nuanced than that and there is scope for the government to facilitate discussions aimed at reasonable, sensible reforms.

The role of intellectual property law in the age of the information economy is a hugely complex topic, and parsing out the various roles and objectives of copyright (let alone intellectual property law more generally) is a monumental task. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to buy the line that protecting copyright (and resisting the liberalisation of the regime via fair use) is synonymous with the interests of artists.