How copyright works
The galloping development of the internet and other technologies is making the world’s creative work – literature, painting, music, games, film – available at the touch of a few keys.
But just because you can easily reproduce or re-publish something you find online, doesn’t mean it’s legal to do so. The ease of copying chunks of text from books on Project Gutenberg, or paintings on Google Art Project, or snippets from classic movies on YouTube, can lull us into a false sense of security that we can legitimately use internet-sourced material however we like.
Copyright law applies to internet content, just as it does to a book you buy in a shop or a painting hanging on a wall. The aim is to give creative people an incentive to create, by protecting their rights to make money from the publication of their work, and to let them control the way their work is used. It would be a dull world indeed if our artists, writers, game designers, computer programmers and filmmakers had to spend all their time waitressing to pay the rent because everyone else was using their work for free.
Copyright applies to most types of creative output. In Australia, copyright protection now generally runs for 70 years after the year of the author’s death. Sometimes many copyrights apply to the one creative work. In a music video, for example, there is not just the song – both lyrics and music – but also the sound recording, the choreography and the video as a whole. And if you want to play the video at a music festival, performing rights may also apply.
Finding the right people to ask for permission to reproduce a literary work is usually simpler. The imprint page of a book should state the publisher’s name and address, and you can write to them to seek permission (usually both the publisher’s and the author’s) to reproduce a section of the book. Some publishers or authors will charge a fee.
There are exemptions from the need to seek permission, such as for some educational purposes. You might freely quote chunks of James Joyce in your PhD thesis, but if you post your thesis online, or publish it as a book or series of journal articles, you must seek written permission from James Joyce’s estate to include those same quotes.
Shakespeare died well over 70 years ago, so his copyright has expired – his works are ‘in the public domain’. But a book publisher who creates a new edition of Hamlet creates a new ‘published edition’ – the book’s cover, design, illustrations and typesetting are protected for 25 years after publication. So please don’t photocopy the volume to distribute among your book club members – encourage them to buy the book and support not only the author and publisher but their local bookseller.
Changing technology means that copyright law will keep changing too. It has certainly come a long way since the first recorded copyright dispute – a squabble between two Irish saints. St Columba secretly made a copy of a beautiful psalter (book of psalms) owned by St Finian. When Finian found out, he demanded the copy, but St Columba refused to hand it over. Finian petitioned Dermott, the King of Ireland, who ruled in Finian’s favour, stating: ‘to every cow belongs her calf, so to every book belongs its copy’.
The intricacies of copyright law are beyond this short article, but the Australian Copyright Council has fact sheets covering nearly every contingency.
