On Wednesday 29th July, the library staff cooked and baked some old favourite recipes in support of ALIA’s Cooking for Copyright campaign. Along with the goodies for tasting, we had a display of old handwritten recipes distributed by ALIA and some “Did you know?” bubbles of information about copyright law in Australia.
The main issue of the display was the inconsistency in copyright law between published and unpublished works. As stated in the press release from the Australian Libraries Copyright Committee, “Copyright in Australia generally lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. However for unpublished works copyright is perpetual – copyright never expires.” This creates problems for library and museum staff trying to digitise old hand written documents and diaries to allow access and to preserve these documents for the future. Internationally, it is common that the same copyright term applies for both published and unpublished works and that is what ALIA is trying to encourage here.
Thank you to the students and staff who took the time to attend and we hope you enjoyed the treats and learnt a little about copyright law as well.
