MEDIA | NEWS ARTICLES
Over the last 5 years the Awards programme has generated
considerable media attention. By profiling the Awards programme,
and the individual winning projects, Childnet hopes to
encourage "best practice" and draw attention
to the individual winning projects.
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 The Age, 7 May 2002
COPYRIGHT ISSUES BECOME KIDS' STUFF
By James Norman
When Newcastle teenagers Emily, Sarah and Elise Boyd
designed the website matmice.com two
years ago, they had no idea of the monster they had created.
The website, which allows
children to easily design their own free websites, has
spawned tens of thousands of matmice.com sites worldwide
and attracted more than 100,000 members.
Many of the sites created through matmice.com are unofficial
fanzine websites created by children in honour of their
favourite rock stars, movie characters and other pop-culture
icons. Harry Potter, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and
the new Star Wars prequels are common subjects.
But by giving children an easy way to download images,
text or animations on to publicly accessible websites,
is matmice.com walking into a copyright storm?
"We are happy to take down sites at the request of
copyright holders," says 19-year-old matmice.com co-creator
and webmaster Emily Boyd, "but a lot of companies
now encourage kids to make fanzine websites - it's free
advertising."
It wasn't always the case. Just before the release of
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the legal department
of Warner Brothers sent letters threatening legal action
to unofficial Potter fan-site webmasters worldwide.
In a now-infamous case, 15-year-old English schoolgirl
Claire Field was threatened with legal action by Warner
Brothers to force her to remove her site at www.harrypotterguide.co.uk
and to hand over the domain right to Warner Bros. It was
only after Field helped organise a boycott of Potter merchandise
in protest, coordinated through the website potterwar.org.uk,
that the studio backed down.
In a significant turnaround, many entertainment industry
companies are now offering fans new ways to legally create
unofficial fan sites, while retaining greater influence
over the content.
Warner Brothers appears to have revised its position on
Harry Potter fan sites. The company issued a statement
promising that "no legal action to take over or shut
down sites has been or will be taken against webmasters
who are determined to be enthusiastic fans who simply want
to pay homage to Harry Potter".
The company added, however, that it would continue to
prosecute sites that sought commercial gain from Harry
Potter, or posted offensive images.
Warner Brothers has also created a Harry Potter Webmaster
Community page, which allows webmasters to enrol their
unofficial sites for regular updates of Harry Potter material
and downloads, plus offers the opportunity for selected
unofficial sites to be linked to Warner Brothers' official
Harry Potter homepage.
"We encourage you to creatively integrate the images
provided on these pages into your website," reads
the Warner Brothers Page, offering a vast selection of
Harry Potter banners, shields and seals.
Emily Boyd says: "Kids love being able to share their
interests with others and think it's great when they get
messages from kids on the other side of the world who've
visited their page and like the same things."
It seems some entertainment giants are so persuaded of
this that they are now actively cultivating contact with
fanzine webmasters. George Lucas, the creator of the Star
Wars series, recently invited high-profile Star Wars webmasters
to spend two days at Skywalker Ranch where they enjoyed
a tour of the grounds and a 20-minute meeting with Lucas.
And Michael Regina, the 23-year-old co-founder of theonering.net,
one of the most popular unofficial Lord of the Rings sites,
was recently employed by New Line Films' viral marketing
department to work on its official website.
But despite the corporate sector's change of attitude
towards online fanzines, Emily Boyd says matmice.com terms
and conditions clearly specify that children must still
be responsible for ensuring they have copyright approval
for the content of their pages.
"Although we do monitor content, it would be impossible
for us to know by looking at a picture on a child's page
whether they had permission to use it," she concedes.
And this is where copyright issues could arise.
Other Australian Web hosts seem to take a similar view,
although most don't actively monitor content. Vic Cinc,
of webcity.com.au, says his company has terminated contracts
in the past, but only after being contacted by aggrieved
copyright holders.
"We won't touch content until a copyright owner contacts
us and demonstrates to our satisfaction that the material
is clearly in violation of the Copyright Act. So, for instance,
if a user put up a Harry Potter site, we won't do anything
about it," he said.
"However, if someone claiming to own the Harry Potter
copyright contacted us demanding we take action against
a user, and we are satisfied that a breach of Commonwealth
law has occurred, we will terminate a hosting contract
with the client on the grounds that this is a violation
of our terms and conditions."
Matmice.com recently moved its content to a large dedicated
server in Hong Kong, which was donated by international
communications giant Cable and Wireless, because its local
server, donated by Scholastic Educational Books, could
not keep up with the site's growth.
1999 |
2000 | 2001
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| 2004 | 2005 |