This week’s lectorial focus is “Media is a public practice”, and there are three guests to share their mix of practical and philosophical advice and experience.

Anne Lennox

Anne’s presentation focuses on copyright. She explains some copyright laws and rules for us. For example, she talked about the rights of ownership, which impressed me. The rule is that the creator/author first owner has the ownership. There are also some exceptions, like employer ownership, contract assignment/licence, and exceptions in law. And owners have several rights like reproducing the work, publishing the work, communicating the work and making an adaption of the work.

Anne also said that there’s no registration requirement in Australia. There’s also no registration requirement in China. In China, copyright was not a big issue. People seemed to not take it seriously. A few years ago, Chinese people could download almost all music, films, articles and books online for free. Some of people didn’t realize that copyright is quite important, and owners should protect their rights. Recently, people in China start to pay attention to the copyright issue. Authors begin to protect their rights by law, and some websites also restrict the access of some music, film, books and so on.

After Anne’s presentation, I learnt more about copyright, which is quite important. I can compare the different situation between Australia and China. When I am going to make my videos or something in the future, I will be aware of the copyright issue. This is really helpful.

Kyla Brettle

The topic of Kyla’s presentation is “exploring the unknown”. I quite like this presentation, because I think I’m now exploring the unknown. As an international student, I come to Australia by myself, and this is my first time living abroad. It’s certainly you will feel nervous or scared when you exploring something unknown, because you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t predict the future. But there’s also surprise or something you look forward to on the way. In my case, at the very beginning, I felt nervous when I arrived here. Everything is new, I had no friends here, my English is not good enough, all these things made me upset. But gradually, I made friends and I could talk to most people, which made me happy. Even though sometimes I still can’t understand the lecture, I don’t give up, I try my best to follow the lecturer.

Kyla’s presentation inspires me, it makes me feel energetic. Not only for media study but also for living in Australia, I will keep exploring the unknown.

Paul Ritchard

Paul talked about the production mostly and he also talked about Serendipity. “Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely.” I think it can be connected to exploring the unknown to some extent. When you are exploring the unknown, it’s of great possibility that you may discover something fortunate. And I think, I may discover something I fortunate or something I never expect during the media study.

Below is a film Paul mentioned when he was talking about serendipity: