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My takeaways from NetHui on Copyright

I attended Internet New Zealand’s one-day NetHui on Copyright at Te Papa today. This event featured great speakers, robust discussion and very delicious catering.

I’m not a copyright expert, so perhaps unsurprisingly, many of my key takeaways from this event weren’t directly about New Zealand’s copyright law. In fact, my internal monologue often wanted to yell “smash capitalism” as a (potentially not-so-helpful) suggestion to fixing many of the issues that need to be addressed.

At its heart, copyright law would ideally enable and value creativity and innovation, and ensure that consumers and citizens have access to a range of content and voices.

To that end, I have cobbled together six principles that I think could go a long way towards realising these values. Most of these principles were gleaned from the speakers and conversations at NetHui. I imagine that as I learn more about copyright and let what I learned today percolate further, my views on these principles may indeed change!

COPYRIGHT IN A DIGITAL WORLD: SIX BROAD PRINCIPLES

  1. If you make access to content easy, universal (e.g. multiple platforms and countries simultaneously) and reasonably priced, it’s less likely people will pirate your content.¹ This goes for both accessing content for personal use, and for those who want to copy or use part of a work to create something new.

  2. Creators should be the primary beneficiaries from the work they create, followed by investors and distributors.² The cut that each party gets should be in proportion to the contribution they make to the product.

  3. In order to facilitate open discussion, criticism and debate, there should be some circumstances in which parts of creative works can be used without getting prior permission from the rights holder. This could include satire, parody, or making a documentary that may not paint the subject in a good light.

  4. Work that is publicly funded should be available to benefit the public good. This includes content produced by the government and publicly funded academic research. Although potentially more tricky, it could also include creative content funded through NZ on Air and other public funding bodies.

  5. Copyright is inextricably linked into all sorts of different issues, so just fixing one piece of legislation is unlikely to make a big difference. If we work out what we want to achieve as a society, then work out what we need to do to get there, it’s more likely we can get lasting change.³

  6. Once you have purchased a product, it should be your right to choose how to get it repaired, what software you use on it, and what data to provide the company about your use of the product.


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    ¹ While this was discussed widely at NetHui, it’s also been talked about a lot by Mark Kermode recently on his weekly podcast with Simon Mayo (in relation to film).

    ² This idea was gleaned from Cory Doctorow’s keynote speech.

    ³ Pia Andrews discussed this idea in the afternoon panel session.

-AP