Obituary: John Adrian Sterling,17 April 1927-29 November 2020

摘要

To many Australian intellectual property lawyers, even those working in the area of copyright and related rights, the name of Adrian Sterling may not be well known. This is because, although born and brought up in Australia, he left nearly 70 years ago and spent the bulk of his working life overseas, mainly in the United Kingdom ("UK"). Adrian was one of the leading figures in international copyright circles for many decades, as well as being a noted teacher and scholar. He was also a man of broad intellectual and cultural interests, a poet, linguist and collector.Adrian was born in Melbourne - along with the late Jim Lahore and myself, although at later periods, we attended the same primary school in Hawthorn - but moved with his family to Sydney in the late 1930s where he finished school at Barker College. He graduated in law from the Sydney Law School in 1949, where his class mates included the late Ian Sheppard and the late Lionel Murphy. He then moved to London where he was called to the Bar in Middle Temple in 1953. Shortly after this, he was attracted by the following advertisement in the Personal section of The Times (an unlikely place for such an advertisement to appear): Young barrister or solicitor needed for international organisation in London. Must speak French, additional language an asset. Without knowing what the position entailed or even what the organisation was, Adrian, who was fluent in French and had knowledge of German, later recalled: As soon as I read that, I knew that that was what I was going to do for the next 20 years. The position turned out be diat of assistant to the Director General of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry ("IFPI") which was then only a small organisation located in London, but at this point Adrian's copyright journey began and continued for the rest of his life.1 In IFPI, he became intimately involved with the legal issues raised by the protection of phonograms, and came to know all the leading copyright lawyers and industry luminaries throughout Europe, North America and Australasia. He learnt, as he used to say, at the "feet of the masters". One of these was Alfred Baum, a German Jewish lawyer who had successfully argued for the recognition of performing rights in sound recordings in the Reichsgericht, 14 November 1936, before having to leave Germany for Switzerland, where he was the legal adviser to IFPI for many years. Baum was a leading commentator on international copyright law and could fairly claim that he had known personally some of the original drafters of the Berne Convention (he was in his early 80s when Adrian first met him in Zurich in 1954).