I am writing this from Hong Kong airport, an auspicious and exotic location in which I have also filled the time waiting for my delayed flight by taking possibly the only selfie I will ever admit to.
I’m on my way back from a trip to Australia, organised with our friends and partners at the Copyright Agency.
During the trip they organised a fabulous series of opportunities to speak and meet people. I have made dozens of presentations and speeches about The Copyright Hub, talking about our work and vision, and showcasing work done to date.
Audiences have included the Australian Society of Authors, parliamentarians and open sessions which attracted dozens of interested individuals and companies. In addition I have done numerous one-to-one presentations and discussions with, among others, Australian ministers and their shadows and teams.
The response has been very warm and enthusiastic, as it has been wherever we take this discussion. It’s clear from all our many conversations that the relevance of our work is universal.
We always hoped it would be, and we have consciously built this as something which can be implemented anywhere, by anyone.
I am confident the first few pioneer Australian Hub Applications will be up and running before too long.
In addition I had some great meetings en-route in Singapore and Hong Kong so the Hub’s profile is growing right around the Pacific rim.
Thanks to everyone who made time for me, and especially to Adam Suckling and Bevan Lisle and everyone at Copyright Agency who organised so much and made it such a productive trip.
Live launches!
As you know, we launched our first Hub Application for Photos on July 30th with the minister for IP, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, buying the first ever licence powered by The Copyright Hub from 4Corners picture library.
You can get our plug-ins now and we have already launched two more similar Hub Applications with at least five more to come before the end of the year. The relentless focus now is on getting more Applications launched so the plug-ins have more material to work with.
In the upcoming months we will be building on the success of our launch in July. Since then, two or three more Hub Applications have already come online. And, soon we'll be announcing details for a launch with the MOCA; an exciting project in collaboration with Oxford University Images.
We are now expanding to other content types, including music and text, as well as building on our core capabilities. As always, we have an exciting couple of months coming up.
Copyright Done Right
When we launched our first live application on July 30th we also launched our new website, called Copyright Done Right. It's there to explain why we're doing what we do, to highlight the support we have to to ask for more.
You can help by offering your own personal statement of support and your logo for us to feature among the many already there. Please do pass the site on to anyone you think might be interested, and give us your feedback and comments too.
Support us and help us support creators and innovators
This matters because our main problem at the moment - a nice problem, but a real one - is keeping up with all the demand for help implementing Hub Applications. We have a flood of interest and need, but a relatively small resource to deploy to meet up.
That means we're focused on raising more resource - a lot more resource - for the next few years so that we can meet this demand and help the Copyright Hub reach critical mass in a range of industries, countries and types of implementations while staying true to puts public good goals.
You can help by showing your support and encouraging others to take an interest in our work as well as - of course, and if you can - by contributing time and money to the project.
I am sure the pace is going to continue to step up and there will be more updates soon. Stay tuned to our twitter account @copyrighthub and talk about what we're doing.
I'll leave you with our latest video where we ask the question 'What is Copyright for?'.