Copyright Seminar

Yesterday I attended two Australian Copyright Council seminars. One for Websites & Online Publications, and the second for User-generated Content; Web2.0

It was really interesting to get a perspective of how Copyright applies within Australia (it's been a longgggg time since I attended the info sessions at the State Library of Victoria when the laws changed in 2005 - although it seems like longer!), particularly for web content.

The presenter discussed the three A's - audit, admin and advice (as in legal).
One particular important piece for the audit part was the questions of what you (or we) do with the content we create/present, but also what our users are going to do with the content within our webpages.
Another interesting point is that the Copyright law which applies will always be Australian Copyright law, not the Copyright law of the country of origin. However, the flip side of that is that our content may be created locally, but if it is viewed internationally then there is a difference in Copyright within another country. For example, Project Gutenburg - George Orwell has about 10 titles listed in the Australian version of Gutenburg, whereas the US version has one.

I could probably go on with my notes, as I took a fair few, but I also found myself getting sidetracked thinking about our website redevelopment project and other various projects that we could do here at YPRL.

I did like that there was discussion of Creative Commons, however one attendee brought up an instance where CC licenses can be altered easily online, so if you were free to use something a certain way at one point they can easily change their mind. So note: always take a print or screen shot of the license at the time of access.

RSS is a new one. I read a blog article recently about what I think was subscription vendors within the health industry not having their websites live updates feed through RSS. You could add them, but content would never display. Sneaky, really. It doesn't seem right, unless they intend to start charging for that information then to disallow feed access is just mean. But whoever said vendors weren't mean?! I am completely neutral...!

I did feel bad for the presenter in the second session. I don't know if I'd been there too long (really not that long at all) or if I just found the content not quite as interesting or as specific for me as I would have liked. A lot of stuff about YouTube and commercial Copyright, whereas I'm more interested in user contributions (comments etc) so I got a little bit sidetracked during that one. I'm quite pleased with myself for resisting the urge to look at my mobile phone with 10 minutes to spare, considering Mr Cool Hair-do across from me sat on his iPhone the whole session.

Oh and the golden moment for the entire morning was that government bodies have a whole lot more flexibility with Copyright than commercial bodies - YAY! But we still have to have good manners, which really should be a given.