If you’ve tried to check something in Wikipedia in the last hour or two, you’ll probably have seen a blacked out page linking to an explanation of its protest against SOPA – hundreds of other sites are doing similar. It might seem unfair to blackout all these sites worldwide (24 hours without lolcats!) for the [...]

And here’s the 2010 National Library of Australia staff Christmas party event: “An interpretation of copyright law – Puttin’ on the Writs”. You can also check their very entertaining, 2009 event at You Tube.

The Monday Muse is a back after a hiatus and this week we’re doing something slightly different. A few weeks ago, several of us had an email conversation about the parallel importation of books in Australia. What follows is a slightly edited and tidied up version of that conversation. But first, what is parallel importation? [...]

According to a recent study from Harvard, file sharing and copyright as they stand at present, are beneficial to society. The working paper “File sharing and Copyright” from economists at the Harvard Business School,  raised important issues including: File sharing has not discouraged creative production. Although album sales have fallen, the number of albums being [...]

This statement comes from LIANZA – via LISNews.org LIANZA welcomes the announcement by the Prime Minister that Section 92A of the Copyright Act is going to be repealed and that the Government proposes to introduce a much fairer copyright provision to prevent unlawful downloads from the Internet. LIANZA reiterates its support for clear copyright law [...]

Anyone who has spent any time near the information desk in an academic library has heard about the EndNote software. Those of us who have been looking for alternatives generally choose the Zotero Firefox plugin for a whole range of different reasons. Whilst reading my RSS feeds this morning I came across a post entitled [...]

According to “Digital copyright: it’s all wrong” a report in Fairfax newspapers from Graeme Philipson, the US has “circulated a draft Discussion Paper on a possible anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting in Tokyo in July.” This document is concerning those who have read it, as it “would enable any border guard, [...]

Late last month tango posted about a report on Australia’s Internet filter. It sparked some discussion and one of the main points was that we, those in the discussion, believe that user education is more important than filtering. With this in mind it was interesting to read on The Australian IT website an article entitled [...]

Random House Audio has announced that “it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers.” (from Boing Boing) Random House Audio  provides downloadable audio to popular Random House print titles, as well as titles from other publishing houses.  Their audio is available through iTunes, Audible and eMusic. [...]

The Queensland State Government has approved the use of Creative Commons licences for intellectual property generated by its departments.  This came about as part of A Government Information open access and use strategy and is expected to be a precursor to the Australian Federal government following with a Creative Commons licences for data generated at [...]