Have yourselves a Merry Christmas!

This is going to be the last post for 2016 as we wind up for the year. I hope this year has been kind to you. It’s certainly been a year of highs and lows politically. Who knows what impact Brexit might have on the UK’s copyright and IP framework? It still seems a strange irony to have attended the CREATe festival on the day the referendum results came out, and we’ll never forget the emotional reaction of the great and the good from the copyright world. No-one was suggesting that the European copyright regime was perfect or that there weren’t real tensions between various groups. However the result created major uncertainty not just for project of harmonisation itself, but also the friends and colleagues from throughout Europe and the rest of the world who have contributed so much to an environment where information and knowledge can be created and disseminated on a sustainable basis.

However, despite these challenges, in the world of copyright education you have to keep ploughing on. Our study of librarians’ experiences of copyright continues to be illuminating and reassuring, as are the reactions from colleagues who understand the importance of copyright to the information and education worlds and continue to find new ways to spread the word. But the day to day reality in higher education is still one where copyright is an after thought and many copyright officers feel that they are being asked to take responsibility for the actions of others. Let’s hope if we continue to make enough noise about it, that might start to change. And we have been making plenty of noise on a whirlwind tour of conferences and events from Glasgow, Dublin, London and Coventry to Prague. Lecture recording and copyright even saw us feature in the Times Higher a few weeks back

So we end the year on an optimistic note and a happy one after the lovely review of Copyright and E-learning by Andy Horton featured yesterday on the ALT blog. We also celebrated with a copyright games party yesterday at University of Kent. Have a lovely break and may copyright literacy continue to flourish and grow in 2017!