Today’s symposium was our first actual, Q&A style “non-lecture”. It was interesting, and honestly I didn’t expect the whole hour to be dedicated to the three pre-decided questions, but it did clear up a lot. In saying that though, a lot more questions were also raised, and for as much as it explained, it left a fair bit to consider.
The main focus of the symposium was copyright, and I was surprised to find out just how much constitutes as copyright infringement. We covered the areas of degradation and opinion vs. critique, and I discovered that so long as you’re critiquing, ie. your opinion is in the public interest and you can back it up with reliable and relevant information or proof, you should be safe. We also discussed how copyright is a part of civil law, and is hence policed civilly, and that there are many cases of copyright infringement that will not be followed up because it is not worth the time, money, effort or reputation that would result (not that this is an excuse to do it anyway!).
Overall the discussions we had has left me a little wary about posting content for fear that I will eventually breach copyright, but as Adrian said, we are going to be media professionals and so we need to know what we are doing. This is where we learn to not slip up!
