Discussing Defamation Further
In the Symposium we discussed all about defamation and the rules that apply when it comes to blogging.
As Jason stated ‘the rules can be bent’ creating the rules to do with Copyright relating to defamation can be very difficult to understand.
COPYRIGHT
When you create blog you are creating copyright protected material but you may want to use other peoples material so it is a good idea to assume other peoples work is protected by copyright until you can get permission or find out otherwise.
This point made me confused as I knew that blogs were filled with links to peoples work, embedded videos and pictures so was I to believe that all bloggers who have used such material had asked for permission first???
This made me nervous as to what I was allowed to put on my blog before I was sued for copyright of defamation.
Adrian spoke of a case of how a no body created a short film that made it into an independent film festival. The opening sequence had a guy brushing his teeth singing along to you’re the voice by John Farnham (not actual song, I forgot real one). It turned out that John Farnham’s manager’s daughter was in the audience so when she got home just passed through conversation that John’s song was sung. John Farnham’s manager then went to the independent film maker and sued him for defamation as he didn’t have permission to use the song so is now working at a 7/11 paying off $200,000.
To help make sense of this I went to Arts Law Centre of Australia web page where there they speak about creative commons.
Creative Commons allows bloggers to gain some rights and reserve others even though a copyright owner will reserve all their rights.
Even placing a video of you singing a cover on YouTube is breaking copyright laws no matter how good or bad your cover is so my overall thoughts on defamation after the symposium is basically don’t say anything you don’t know that’s fact especially when it could come back to hurt you as you don’t know whose watching your blogs.