Here are some of my musings from what was discussed in the first Networked Media symposium i was able to attend (I’m now two weeks post-arthroscopic surgery and can return to my regular activities! Hooray!):

The first question raised was ‘how much freedom do we have when writing critically of others or others’ work before we become liable for defamation or copyright infringement?’

We must begin to understand the rights and responsibilities of someone who operates a blog. As a blog owner, you are responsible for everything that is published on your blog – including in the comments. There is a difference between opinion and critique – we mustn’t make claims that are derogatory or defamatory towards people and dress them up as fact. The ‘truth’ is not a defence, and similarly, authorial intent counts for nothing. Regardless of if you intended for something to be offensive or not, if it has been perceived as offensive by someone or someones then it is.

There is a lot of complications when ascertaining whether your published material is ‘in the public interest’. Also remember that these laws differ between jurisdictions and across national borders. This is one of the growing concerns media professionals are adapting to in the face of globalisation, having to now work across a number of legal structures and licenses. 

It is up to the copyright holder to take action, however this area is becoming more and more aggressive, with entire law firms and organisations being dedicated to trawling the internet to find examples of copyright infringement (such as PPCA and APRA). Disney is a great example of how some organisations are being more lenient of traditional copyright law in order to benefit their audience-base who, in this example, formed such a community around the culture of Frozen (2013) where over 60,000 fan-made covers of the song ‘Let It Go’ have been shared across social media and have been collectively viewed more than 60 million times, even though these were all technically breaches of copyright.

We then spoke about the grey area of embedding. Adrian agreed that the existence of an embed button pretty much means you can use the content on your own site, because it is somewhat understood that the original source are the ones bearing liability. However, where this becomes a serious issue is when a user downloads the material and re-uploads it themselves instead of directly embedding it. The content is now being hosted on your own site, meaning you are infringing copyright.