Lecture Week 9: Copyright
In the workshop today, we discussed copyright at length and were able to ask questions. I probably have 50 million more questions on topic due to my lack of previous knowledge and high amount interest in the topic (Who knew I would think copyright law was so fascinating?)
I was particularly interested in ‘fair dealing’ and the strictness of it compared to the many shades of grey, and leniency of ‘fair-use’ that my homeland (US) has and that I am much more familiar with. Unlike in the US where ‘fair use’ “permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders“. A great example of how something is ‘fair use’ in the US is to look at any image used within Wikipedia. For example, if I go to the Wikipedia page for ‘Hamilton: An American Musical’ and click on the featured image it will take me to a page that gives the rationale for fair use of the copyrighted image :
Screen Shot of Hamilton’s Wikipedia page
This rational is not viable (legal) in Australia. The only exceptions are if the material is used within Study, criticism or review, Reporting the news, or Parody/satire.
I feel these limitations directly hurt the quality of discourse surrounding texts.
This chat was also very timely as I had posted an article about a possible change to geo-blocking laws in Australia this morning which came about due to The Productivity Commission publishing a draft report with recommendations on all things related to intellectual property :
