Wednesday 17 October 2007

Election debates should be openly available: Expert

As Australia’s political leaders quibble over the extent and format of broadcast debates in the federal election campaign, a copyright expert from The Australian National University says all parties should follow Barack Obama’s call to make debates freely accessible across all media and technology platforms.

Earlier this year Mr Obama urged his party’s leadership in the US to make the recordings of all Democratic Presidential debates available in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license, which allows content sharing under certain caveats. He argued this would ensure “that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.”

Dr Matthew Rimmer from the ANU College of Law said that Australia’s political leaders have already embraced new media such as YouTube and Facebook as political tools, and that the ALP has called for a debate to be broadcast on YouTube. He said both parties should go a step further to ensure that digital copyright issues do not become an impediment to the sharing of election debate broadcasts.

“Whichever television networks or internet media end up broadcasting the federal election debates, it’s important to the health of our democracy that people are free to capture and distribute the dialogue of our prospective leaders so that they can make a more informed decision,” Dr Rimmer said. “New file sharing networks and technologies mean we have more potential than ever before to choose the time and place in which we consume media – provided we are not restricted by unnecessary copyright requirements.”

In his new book Digital copyright and the consumer revolution: Hands off my iPod, Dr Rimmer traces the development of the Creative Commons movement as “a viable alternative to the proprietary culture of the copyright industries and the ‘free for all’ of the users of peer-to-peer networks”. This US-based initiative, which turns five in December, has generated a range of licences that allow content creators to share their material under such conditions as attribution being given, the work being used for non-commercial purposes only, or that the work be reproduced in its original form.

Dr Rimmer argues that such movements could be a way to address the needs of a wide range of creators across multiple formats in many jurisdictions. Yet he says the Creative Commons movement is not without its problems, as was demonstrated earlier this year when the parents of a girl from Texas sued Virgin Australia for using a photo of her in an advertisement. The image had been posted online under a Creative Commons licence that required the photograph be attributed, but one that didn’t restrict commercial re-use.

ANU Media Office: Simon Couper 02 6125 4171/0416 249 241