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Copyright in the Digital Age
Paul Hetherington
A paper presented at the seminar, ‘Copyright in the Digital Age: Challenges
and Opportunities for Offering Creative Work in the Digital Environment’,
Wednesday, 17 May 2006, National Library of Australia
My name is Paul Hetherington and I am Director of the National Library of
Australia’s Publications and Events Branch. The Library publishes material
in both print and digital form.
Clearly issues associated with digital publishing are complex and I cannot
begin to summarise them in five minutes. However, I would like to make the
following brief observations.
- Digital publishing offers a wide variety of opportunities for authors
and is significantly changing the relationships that have existed
in the print publishing world between authors and publishers.
- This is partly because authors can fairly easily become their own
publishers in the digital world, without the same stigma that used
to attach to so-called ‘vanity’ or self-publishing’.
The rapid increase in blogs in recent years is one example of this
kind of digital self-publishing.
- Digital publishing also offers creative possibilities that extend
the possibilities offered by the print publishing world; the
possibility, for example, to mix and match material in a way that is not
easily possible with print publishing. Sound and images can be married
to text, and links to associated sites can be readily incorporated.
For the National Library, for example, digital publishing provides
a marvellous opportunity to widely disseminate digital versions
of key collection material.
- This means that digital publishing tends, inherently, to be more
fluid and more multidimensional than print publishing. Some digital
publishing also tends to be more changeable and unstable.
- Certainly the idea of a stable ‘text’ is increasingly
under challenge in the digital publishing world. This can be an issue
for libraries and archives, who may wish to archive a digital publication.
Which version do they choose—yesterday’s, today’s
or tomorrow’s?
- What is and is not authoritative is increasingly being questioned.
One example of a digital publication where changeability is promoted
as part of its virtue is the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.
In Wikipedia the capacity to add to entries and to modify them progressively,
using what is in part a self-regulating quality control process,
have been argued by some people to be publishing virtues and
have been criticised by others
- The difficulty in such environments is that it is not always clear
what information can be trusted. While traditional book publication
processes have also been criticised by some as inflexible and
imperfect, they do tend to ensure certain standards of editorial and content
checking and control. A challenge in the digital environment
is to ensure that there are appropriate editorial and quality control processes.
- The word ‘appropriate’ is crucial here. Blogs do not
necessarily need such control because they are much like interactive
online diaries or journals. But many online dictionaries, databases
and encyclopaedias will eventually stand or fall partly according
to whether the information that they provide is reasonably accurate
and comprehensive.
- Digital publishing offers new and exciting opportunities for scholarly
publishing, where relatively small constituencies of scholars
and researchers can publish online journals that have become unviable
in print form. These journals can be enhanced in the process,
providing spaces for contributors and readers to exchange views quickly
and easily.
- Online publication also suits databases and other kinds of information-focused
text which benefits from being easily searchable. It also encourages
new print publishing models, such as the developing print-on-demand
processes.
- However, many issues involving digital publishing remain unresolved,
and copyright issues and moral rights issues are perhaps even
more important in the online environment than for the print publishing
world. Different assumptions have tended to apply to the online
world, where text and images can easily be cut and pasted from one document
to another and even where copyright is asserted on web sites
it is not always possible to ensure that all users have complied.
- But digital publishing is opening up exciting new possibilities
for everyone, and that is the note on which I would like to conclude
these remarks.
