All rights reserved: Mike Seyfang

Today’s lecture reinforced how there is are not many clear distinctions in copyright, but rather a lot of grey areas.

There are obvious breaches of copyright, such as posting another person’s image without crediting the original producer. On the other end of the spectrum, there are clear boundaries set in place to ensure you are not breaching copyright, such as Creative Commons licenses. Although there are many grey areas, in fact more grey areas than there are clear black and white guidelines for copyright.

For example, even though Creative Commons licenses usually dictate that the content is copyright free, there are restrictions and rules within these licenses that vary depending on the producer’s selections. Therefore when using Creative Commons content, the user still needs to be very careful that they aren’t breaching any licenses and restrictions put in place by the producer.

Click here to view the different levels of licensing with creative commons content.

The biggest take away from the lecture was that copyright is policed by the producer and only the produced can sue an individual or company for breaching copyright.

The most interesting thing that I learnt was  you cannot copyright ideas. Only tangible objects (including colours) can be trademarked or given copyright.