The Dublin Book Festival kicked off today in the City Hall in Dublin city centre. It’s the second year of the event and, since I had the day free I dragged the husband along.
When we arrived at the City Hall there was a pleasant buzz. Hoards of school children trooped in and out to meet various authors and people were sitting around reading books they had picked up from the well stocked publishers’ shelves dotted around the main hall.
There’s a coffee shop and loads of stalls around the hall…I would highly recommend the free pen but to be frank, any opportunity to feed my stationary habit gives me a warm glow inside (yes, I know I probably need to get out more).
Sitting over a coffee and a muffin it was great to the hall buzzing with people, even without the festival getting as much publicity as it could have got. As a country renowned for our writers, we are sometimes not very good at celebrating the fact and I’ve often grouched about the lack of festivals where a writer or wannabe writer could pitch up and learn something.
Today I had my eye on a seminar on copyright issues. It might not be the sexiest topic under the sun but if you’re a writer of any kind it’s kind of a big one. The last time I had actually sat down and listened to a talk on the subject I was in college and we were being told about the tendency of certain nefarious editors who would use our copy willie nillie especially on this new fangled Internet thing (it was quite a while ago). The issue had got considerably more complex since then!
As I said it’s been a while since I’ve actually sat down and listened to anything about copyright. It’s a day to day part of life nowadays but it’s only when listening to the information in one go that you realise how many assumptions you make and how many gaps there are in your knowledge. It’s an important issue but one that it’s easy to gloss over and assume you know everything there is to know.
So the talk from the Irish Copyright Licencing Agency was fascinating. It covered the basics of copyright law as well as Creative Commons, PLR and the Google Book Settlement. It’s great to get a basic overview of stuff like that.
I’ve had copyright drummed into me from the very first steps I took into journalism. It’s a complex topic but one any writer needs to know their way around.
I’ll be heading back in tomorrow – there’s a discussion at 1.30 on the future of Irish publishing (again rather pertinent). I’d highly recommend a trip in to see what’s on offer. Events like this deserve to get all the support they can get.
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