Module 3 - Copyright

First of all let me get this out of the way. I used the OUA and Curtin logos on my HTML page. In hindsight, and after a fair bit of research and reading of both the Curtin Copyright Policy and Proceedure and the Curtin Logo Use Proceedure, I have come to the conclusion that I have indeed breached Copyright.

Bugger.

Copyright and Intellectual Property is such a complex and touchy subject. There are so many differing points of view held by so many different people with so many different things at stake, it's hard to find a middle ground, or so it seems with the debate that is constantly going on.

I found it interesting to read the Copyright Website and Curtin's own excellent Copyright at Curtin page. Both gave a good balanced view of what Copyright is and how it is applied with some good guidelines and practical scenarios. A little further reading on the sites also gave me some interesting information about Fair Use, particularly around study which will be very useful indeed. Though all this reading material was good, I was a disappointed the course material didn't contain any reference to Creative Commons as a Copyright instrument.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation which publish the Creative Commons License. Originally inspired by the GNU GPL, this license works in tandem with traditional Copyright, the difference is with Creative Commons you have much greater flexibility. In that you can change your Copyright from All Rights Reserved to Some Rights Reserved and the like.

In my mind Creative Commons is the way of the future when it comes to online Copyright, or Copyright of any nature for that matter. I feel that initiatives such as this, and the Open Source software culture, will eventually change the way people look at Copyright and IP in general.