Most modern laws that protect new plant varieties derive from the 1961 International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which was subsequently revised in 1972, 1978 and 1991. The UPOV Conventions provide a system that enables breeders to recoup some of the associated costs of bringing a plant into cultivation through the grant of exclusive rights in the reproductive and propagating material of a new plant variety. By way of balance, others can use protected varieties for further breeding of new varieties. This regime provides additional benefits for contracting states: the ability to control the reproduction and maintenance of their own plant varieties as well as the improvement of access to new varieties from other countries. Following an extensive debate, Australia adopted the minimum standards in UPOV 1978 and enacted them in the form of the Plant Variety Rights Act 1987 (Cth). Some years later, Australia adopted and implemented the provisions of the 1991 revision of the Convention (UPOV 1991) in the Plant Breeder’s Rights Act 1994 (Cth) (PBRA). The Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Productivity Commission Response Part 1 and Other Measures) Act 2018 (Cth) made both substantive and procedural amendments to the PBRA, all of which are in effect at the date of publication. The principal substantive reforms relate to essentially derived varieties, unjustified threats of infringement, and discretion to award additional damages. The text below presents the law following these amendments. IP Australia is responsible for the administration of the PBRA.

The rights of an owner of a registered trade mark are stated in s 20(1) to be the exclusive right to use the trade mark and to authorise other persons to use the trade mark in relation to goods and/or services in respect of which the trade mark is registered. This general commercial freedom of the owner to use a trade mark is subject to government restrictions on that use. In addition, s 20(2) provides that the registered owner has the right to obtain relief under the Act if the trade mark has been infringed.

The registration of trade marks was a reasonably natural development beyond the law of passing off. While passing off or its statutory equivalents have and still have numerous advantages, they are inadequate in some respects as a means of facilitating the exploitation of signs used to indicate the origin of goods or services or as a means of defining and regulating property rights.

This chapter examines some of the rights that are closely associated with but not usually seen as part of copyright law. The first section examines the moral rights that are given to creators upon creation of a copyright work. Moral rights are independent of copyright but arise where copyright subsists in a work, and continue to exist even though the creator may have sold (assigned) their copyright in the work. This is followed by an examination of the protection given to performers under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The law in this area has undergone a number of recent changes, principally as a result of the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement 2004 (AUSFTA), which extended the protection to include control over authorised sound recordings of performances, as well as providing moral rights for certain types of performances. Later sections of this chapter consider resale royalty rights, circuit layout rights, and the public and educational lending rights schemes.