Talking about copyright
June 17
The issue of copyright and, more specifically, Lynne Spender’s essay, ‘The Question of Literary Property’, published in the June edition of Meanjin and delivered, as a lecture, at May’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, has been the cause of some debate of late.
A couple of weeks ago Spender debated Morris Gleitzman on the subject on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. The posting of portions of that transcript at Overland’s blog also roused a lot of interest.
With the rise of on-line publication, e-books, digital piracy and so on, the question of whether intellectual property can or should be owned, and for how long, is becoming increasingly contentious. There is no doubt that the media and publishing environment is changing rapidly and that existing copyright laws are baulking under the strain, unable to deal with the sheer complexity of cases (for an old Spike post on this, go here). But the real question is what to do about it. Should we strive for a new model, one which relaxes the notion of permission and consent and embraces the ideas of allowing the sharing of knowledge and information? If so, how will this square with the belief that, as Morris Gleitzman has put it, authors ‘should be able to own and derive income from our labours [as] a really basic sort of principle that is part of a tradition of social justice’?
We suspects the debate is more complex than either of these questions - but there is absolutely no doubt the argument needs to be had, and the time for having it is pressing.
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Comments
17 Jun 09 at 19:20
"But if we want to move more quickly to prevent literary property ... from being locked into private ownership for extended periods of time, we need to change the law." I don't want to prevent literary property from being locked up in private ownership. I want to own my work. And I can't see any argument in there as to why I shouldn't want to own my work.
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