Visiting Fulbright Scholar Professor Patricia Aufderheide from the American University School of Communication in Washington is working with colleagues at QUT to gather information from artists and creators on how creators use copyright material in their work via a national survey to explore what works in copyright exceptions and limitations for Australian creators.
As Patricia explained: ‘This issue is of importance to artists because the right of creators to control future use of their work is also, by definition, a limitation on what is created in that future. To deal with areas in which such limitations might burden the future of creativity, all societies create some escape hatches, called exceptions and limitations’.
‘For 20 years, Australians have been wrangling, not about whether exceptions and limitations should be changed to accommodate the modern world, but how. In those 20 years, no study has ever been done to explore how creators currently experience the exceptions and limitations they do have. This leaves the field open for large but unfounded claims for the benefits and the hazards of different kinds of change. Learning more about the actual experience of creators can inform future discussions in a way that includes creators’.
Patricia will be explaining more about the topic and her work in edition 8 of NiTRO but in the meantime, the survey is available at: https://american.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bKQLpFacNB9cZb7