I haven’t been to that many workshops in general though I seem to be attending more of them lately as I’m looking for ways to learn through the community and be more involved. I randomly heard of this lecture taking place at Photographic Center Northwest presented by the Washington Lawyers for the Arts and decided I would check it out.
This workshop was good. I don’t know that I learned anything major as I’ve had a class on the subject of copyright at Shoreline Community College in the past. I did find it interesting in a couple of different ways. The atmosphere and all the people who were there were great, and the lawyer who was speaking, Venkat Balasubramani, also did a great job. They passed outlines to everyone to follow along with the lecture and it was very thorough. He invited people with questions to interrupt as he went along unless it was something specific, where he then suggested that the audience email him or ask him about it afterwards. All of that was good and the info was particularly basic which is good for “Copyright 101″ and he didn’t shy away from questions that had to do with copyright issues which were more complicated either.
A whole “other” part of the meeting I thought was incredibly interesting is that upon attending this lecture I’m in the mindset that people are going to this to learn how to protect their work, that they have created, from other people who might use it or incorporate it into other works. What I learned is not only are people asking questions about protecting their original work, but also about using other peoples work and how to protect themselves when doing so and incorporating it into their work. It wasn’t as blatant as what I just wrote, though the topic was brought up numerous times in a variety of contexts.
Another thing, the Photographic Center Northwest is the only facility (in Seattle at least) which has dark rooms available for public use. I thought that was REALLY cool. They have a lot of these type of meetings/lectures/classes.
Photographic Center Northwest - http://www.pcnw.org/
Washington Lawyers for the Arts - http://www.thewla.org/index
