Copyright Craziness | Tangled up in Purple

This has implications for New Zealand schools:

It seems that the Australian copyright people want to collect a fee from schools to cover printing from web pages.

As Cory Doctorow puts it (he is more eloquesnt than I am):

Now they say that they deserve to collect for the use of the Web. Despite the fact that there’s an implied license to read Web pages that goes along with publishing them (who puts up a web-page without expecting it to be read?) and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages online weren’t created by Australians, and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages created by Australians weren’t created by professional authors, the agency proposes that it should be able to collect a tax on behalf of all those authors in the world in order to line the pockets of its few lucky members.

Australian educators are saying that if they are going to be charged they are going to have to turn off their internet connections because the cost will be too high:

“If it turned out we’d have to pay them, we’d turn the internet off in schools,” the council’s national copyright director Delia Browne said.

“We couldn’t afford it; it would not be sustainable. How on earth are we going to deliver education in the 21st century? How are taxpayers going to afford this.”

I need to do some research.

2 thoughts on “Copyright Craziness”

Manovich’s whole sense of new media allowing “collaborative authorship” and “text as a tissue of quotations” makes this an interesting discussion to have when we look at how we use the web.

What can we own? and What should we own? has always interested me.

I read quite diverse stuff online – for example I subscribe to Robert Genn’s twice weekly newsletter – it is a little uneven but gives me necessary insights into an artists thinking, rather than educational thinking – Robert’s latest post takes a different look at arguments about copyright. You might enjoy the connections it makes with your post when you think about the level below the web pages.

“There’s a big dust-up coming to the US Congress. It involves moving the goalpost on copyrighted works of art. It’s about “orphan works.” These are works of art where no one seems to claim copyright–or where the original author is hard to find.
This new legislation, if passed, will isolate the USA from the Berne Convention and make an impact on the livelihood of many creative people worldwide, particularly photographers and illustrators.

It’s also possible to see the point of view of folks on the other side. Right now it’s difficult for historians and scholars to get clearance for a lot of things. Researchers spend hours on the telephone and the Internet trying to get permission from dead and invisible creators who sometimes don’t care. The American Historical Association, for example, explains that orphan works “hamper the historian’s ability to work with the raw materials of history.”

For those artists who want to get paid for their stuff–particularly their old stuff–it’s going to take a lot of slogging to go through, and put a copyright bug on, everything they’ve done.

If legislation goes ahead, it looks to me as if copyright and owner information must now be embedded in all future art.
Digital cameras will have to feature a signature option for every photo–no matter how zoomed or cropped. Users would then have no choice but to track down and ask permission. On the other hand, unsigned or un-bugged material would be deemed fair game for reproduction or other uses. It would certainly be a boon for educators. With the current trend toward unbridled sharing within our global village, this could mean the end of copyright.

It’s a fact of life for artists that most infringements are too expensive to litigate anyway. Also, there’s a grey area between benign use and outright commercial exploitation. It’s been my experience that painters are often respected in this matter–perhaps it’s the tradition of the signature in the lower right. For architects, photographers, illustrators and graphic artists, it’s another kettle of fish. Some of them are now looking for other jobs.”

Hey Artichoke,

Thanks for sharing a fascinating insight from someone who has thought about the issues. This is a really important discussion to have and to be part of because it impacts upon us all in so many ways.

The Creative Commons movement and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are one key component in the future. Enlightened governments (I feel a Tui Ad moment) are another and so are all the artists, musicians, writers, software developers, designers, thinkers … teachers … citizens.

I think we need to keep thinking and talking about this. It’s certainly not something we talk about much in terms of working with teachers but when you consider the nature of our work, it’s actually a really important conversation to keep coming back to.

Artichoke on March 4, 2006 at 9:48 am said:

Manovich’s whole sense of new media allowing “collaborative authorship” and “text as a tissue of quotations” makes this an interesting discussion to have when we look at how we use the web.

What can we own? and What should we own? has always interested me.

I read quite diverse stuff online – for example I subscribe to Robert Genn’s twice weekly newsletter – it is a little uneven but gives me necessary insights into an artists thinking, rather than educational thinking – Robert’s latest post takes a different look at arguments about copyright. You might enjoy the connections it makes with your post when you think about the level below the web pages.

“There’s a big dust-up coming to the US Congress. It involves moving the goalpost on copyrighted works of art. It’s about “orphan works.” These are works of art where no one seems to claim copyright–or where the original author is hard to find.
This new legislation, if passed, will isolate the USA from the Berne Convention and make an impact on the livelihood of many creative people worldwide, particularly photographers and illustrators.

It’s also possible to see the point of view of folks on the other side. Right now it’s difficult for historians and scholars to get clearance for a lot of things. Researchers spend hours on the telephone and the Internet trying to get permission from dead and invisible creators who sometimes don’t care. The American Historical Association, for example, explains that orphan works “hamper the historian’s ability to work with the raw materials of history.”

For those artists who want to get paid for their stuff–particularly their old stuff–it’s going to take a lot of slogging to go through, and put a copyright bug on, everything they’ve done.

If legislation goes ahead, it looks to me as if copyright and owner information must now be embedded in all future art.
Digital cameras will have to feature a signature option for every photo–no matter how zoomed or cropped. Users would then have no choice but to track down and ask permission. On the other hand, unsigned or un-bugged material would be deemed fair game for reproduction or other uses. It would certainly be a boon for educators. With the current trend toward unbridled sharing within our global village, this could mean the end of copyright.

It’s a fact of life for artists that most infringements are too expensive to litigate anyway. Also, there’s a grey area between benign use and outright commercial exploitation. It’s been my experience that painters are often respected in this matter–perhaps it’s the tradition of the signature in the lower right. For architects, photographers, illustrators and graphic artists, it’s another kettle of fish. Some of them are now looking for other jobs.”
nix on March 5, 2006 at 9:28 pm said:

Hey Artichoke,

Thanks for sharing a fascinating insight from someone who has thought about the issues. This is a really important discussion to have and to be part of because it impacts upon us all in so many ways.

The Creative Commons movement and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are one key component in the future. Enlightened governments (I feel a Tui Ad moment) are another and so are all the artists, musicians, writers, software developers, designers, thinkers … teachers … citizens.

I think we need to keep thinking and talking about this. It’s certainly not something we talk about much in terms of working with teachers but when you consider the nature of our work, it’s actually a really important conversation to keep coming back to.