Mairtin has an interesting story. Yesterday he spotted one of his paper’s photographs on the culture Minister’s blog, and he quotes St Columcille in support of the copyright law… The picture has since been removed… Now as Mairtin notes himself we’ve all ‘borrowed’ other peoples’ work. Indeed many blogging software makes it too easy to do so. But he looks to the Minister for some kind of leadership on this. For the Slugger Awards Moochin Photoman put his photographs available under a Creative Commons licence which makes the photographers work available for republication, but under certain conditions. As Mark points out, this has certain limitations (mostly, I would suggest, because people don’t know about it). Early in the new year we’ll be running a training session for our contributors and the use of Creative Commons licence will be part of a session on using the huge amount of excellent photographs becoming available through the flickr Northern Ireland and other groups… The Minister would be welcome to come along…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty