Copyright: Fair Use, Fair For Who?

A magpie gatecrashing the talk,
' Copyright: Fair Use, Fair for Who?'

I recently caught a talk at the Byron Bay Writers Festival called, 'Copyright: Fair Use, Fair for Who?', which I never intended listening to.

'The World of Animals' talk minus
Ceridwen Dovey at the BBWF

I had intended listening to a talk called, 'The World of Animals', because I had bought Ceridwen Dovey's book 'Only the Animals' that morning in the book tent, not knowing anything about the author, and she was meant to be on this panel with Michael Leunig, Briohny Doyle and Jeni Caffin.
For some reason Ceridwen Dovey couldn't make the talk, so I decided to go for a wander around and check out other talks that were on at that time.
I wanted to hear a talk involving animals, as I'm big on the shamanic guidance of animals as teachers, which is why I had picked up Ceridwen's book earlier, as to me there seemed to be shamanic, although fictitious stories about animals throughout history observing human events of historic significance. 
I already just before this talk had a rather unexpected encounter with a butcher bird, which I wrote about in an earlier post called -
Another Orb at the Byron Bay Writers Festival?
I see encounters with animals like this as a form of shamanic guidance from beyond everyday life and take note when these encounters set my spidey senses tingling in the web of life experience.
I think weird animal encounters are powerful messages trying to communicate something that I should take note of and be led by from life's hidden wisdom. 
A Powerful Owl Synchronicity at the BBWF For Me
In around about way this led me to a talk about copyright, even though I was in the mood for animal stories and not something which sounded like it was going to be a waste of my time.
I attended this talk because on the panel were authors I respected as wise people, Tom Keneally and Melissa Lucashenko and struck me as spiritual, so I went to see what they had to say, expecting nothing out of the ordinary.

A magpie gatecrashing the talk,
' Copyright: Fair Use, Fair for Who?'

But to my surprise a magpie flew onto the front of the stage and waddled across the front like he owned the stage, and this took place in a tent, not out in the open field somewhere.
I was lucky enough to get a shot of the magpie as he got to the end of the stage, as I had my iPod switched off at the time and thought the bird would have flown away before the iPod booted up.
This all led to a discussion about a book called 'Magpie Island', so the magpie had influenced the talk in a direction it was probably never headed in the first place, which made it into a rather shamanic talk I thought, and I came away glad I had attended.
Such are the messages of the animal world, it seems. 

Being a blogger who doesn't make any money out of my blog I often ignore copyright law and rely on "fair use" in my posts, which I feel is fair enough, as my posts tend to promote the books, movies or works of art I discuss in those posts, so I usually don't seek permission to use a still from a movie, or a passage from a book, but I do highlight the quoted passage and link it back the author or artist whose work I'm writing about in those posts.
If an artist by some miracle read my post about their work and told me they were unhappy about its use in my post, I would happily delete that post at their request, but I don't set out to exploit works I admire and certainly not to make monetary gain on their work.
There has to be middle ground on the issue where fair use means just that and shouldn't be exploited by either party, I feel.  
But if I was an artist, or author I would like to be protected by copyright law to stop a person who I thought was exploiting my work and be able to stop or sue them if I saw fit to do so.

I signed the petition last night and became the 16888th (auspicious number, or what?-) to do so, and if you would like to do the same, then click on this link -
Save Australian literature: stop parallel importation of books
and sign your life away.
I think it is worth signing, just in case I ever have some great Australian work to protect in the future, which is unlikely, but if I ever did I would like to think I had the right to say how my work is used fairly.
You can learn more at the Books Create Australia website.
Cheers ... and don't feel obliged to copy me ... make up your own mind:-)