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Media companies’ campaign against internet piracy suffered a major setback last week when a federal court judgement let internet service providers off the hook for their customers’ illegal downloads. But the copyright wars are more than just a matter for the courts, write Julian Thomas and Ramon Lobato in Inside Story

The following report considers a number of key challenges the Australian Federal Government faces in designing the regulatory framework and the reach of its planned mandatory internet filter. Previous reports on the mandatory filtering scheme have concentrated on the filtering technologies, their efficacy, their cost and their likely impact on the broadband environment. This report focuses on the scope and the nature of content that is likely to be caught by the proposed filter and on identifying associated public policy implications.

With the revenue downturn for Fairfax Media being announced on Monday, I got the call from Ashley Hall at the ABC’s PM program to give my opinion. At 2.45pm I may not have been sure that I had an opinion, but the nature of the relationship between news journalists and academics is that it would be good for all concerned if you could get an opinion, and give that to us to put on air. With Crikey publisher Eric Beecher and former ACCC head Allan Fels also offering their opinions, I was in good company on the PM program.

YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.

Story Circle is the first collection ever devoted to a comprehensive international study of the digital storytelling movement, exploring subjects of central importance on the emergent and ever-shifting digital landscape.

* Covers consumer-generated content, memory grids, the digital storytelling youth movement, participatory public history, audience reception, videoblogging and microdocumentary
* Pinpoints who is telling what stories where, on what terms, and what they look and sound like

Faculty Seminar Series

Professor Justin O’Connor, Research Capacity Building Professor Tuesday 28th April 12pm-1pm The Hall (Z2-226) CI Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove

Creative labour: emancipation or honey-trap?

Submission to the ABC and SBS Review, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

In the early 1990s a new image of British national identity emerged on the pages of The Face, Dazed and Confused and Vogue. Fashion and style photography created an aesthetic out of the lives of young Londoners and the places they lived in, including second-hand markets, the rave scene and shared flats.

Watkins, J., (2007) ‘Social Media, Participatory Design and Cultural Engagement’. OzCHI Conference, Adelaide, November 2007.

Watkins, J. and Russo, A., (2007) ‘Participatory Design and Co-creativity in Cultural Institutions’. Museums Australia Conference, Canberra, May 2007. http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/

Watkins, J. and Russo, A., (2007) ‘Cultural Institutions, Co-creativity and Communities of Interest’, in Schuler, D. (ed.), Online Communities and Social Computing, HCII 2007, LNCS 4564, pp. 212–221.