With the rise of digital technology, the question of whether intellectual property can or should be owned is becoming increasingly relevant. Yet even as we make the push towards online content, our copyright system is baulking under the strain of the information boom.
In this lecture, Lynne Spender considers the implication of Google’s creation of a searchable database of the world’s books before speaking on the ethics of reproducing writers’ work, expanding on the issues brought to light in her essay in the forthcoming June edition of Meanjin. What happens to education, and more broadly our society, when ideas are viewed as private property, only accessible through permission or payment? Spender asks whether we need a cultural shift in the way we view knowledge and information sharing. Chaired by Sophie Cunningham.
LYNNE SPENDER (LOCAL) LYNNE SPENDER is a writer, editor and digital consultant. Her most recent publication is Between the Lines: a Legal Guide for Writers and Illustrators. Having worked as director of the Australian Society of Authors and the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, she has a particular interest in the differences between print and digital cultures and has just completed a PhD on Digital Culture and the Challenge to Copyright Law. Her current interest centres on the philosophical and practical question: who owns - and should own - knowledge and information?
SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM (INTERSTATE) Sophie Cunningham has worked in publishing for 20 years as an editor of fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel was Geography and her second, Bird. She is working on a third, This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf’s time as a colonial administrator in Ceylon and the first years of his marriage to Virginia. Sophie is currently the editor of the literary quarterly Meanjin.
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