Art, Design, Culture and Copyright Protections
Let me begin this article with a question to artists and designers – do you understand current copyright law? Or, more simply, could you say that your work is free from copyright sin? The changes over recent years to copyright law and the explosion of digitisation have made it more than ever a concern of the professional to understand where our own work stands in the spotlight of the law. I should mention at this point, being on holiday, I’m just finishing Professor James Boyle’s latest book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (also available as a free download version under Creative Commons licensing). While it’s not the crux of his book, as such, he definately provokes me to consider where the line now stands for that which is free to use and not free to use. I would have to say many of us really aren’t aware of the current line in the sand, if one can be so easily stated for us.
This locking down of intellectual property, from the perspective of a writer or an artist or designer, could be interpreted solely as a positive protection of our rights as creators. But the down side? How can society evolve culturally if everything worth commenting on or pulling apart is locked down like a fortress with a gatekeeper demanding entry fees? Even worse, if the vast majority of owners are unidentifiable or unfound? How can art and design, or writing or music for that matter, evolve without utilising that which has come before? I’m not really that down with Australian copyright law myself but the number of artists and designers that I personally know who grab images out of books or off the web is a concern.
But most of all I’m concerned that not only are our artists and designers not being informed by government or their industry bodies en masse about what they are legally allowed to do – for example, the University of Tasmania’s School of Art teaches zero students about their copyright obligations – there is also the cultural damage being done by locking down the 20th century, as Boyle says, with little or no benefit returned. Our culture, and art / design along with that culture, requires the ability to draw from itself to create new avenues of evolution and new masterpieces. New books, music, images.
