Artistic licence!

Unlike countries with a fair use exemption, copyright laws in Australia require artists to secure prohibitively expensive licences for even the smallest quotation of others’ work.
Patricia Aufderheide

Once a year, in early October, around 60 people gather at the City of Whittlesea’s Fountain View Room in the northern fringe of Melbourne to begin 10 weeks of rehearsal for a single concert.

They span generations – aged from eight to over 90 – cultures and faiths. For nine months of each year they never see each other, and then they come together to sing Christmas carols as part of a healing process that began after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. I documented one year’s worth of rehearsals with the help of a grant from the council and volunteers from First Impressions Youth Theatre.

The result, a 30-minute documentary called This Choir Sings Carols (2016), writes Patricia Aufderheide, will probably never be seen.

Since then, it has, but that story is for another time. For now, we are interested in why the film was constrained from being publicly seen. Read Copyright rules crippling artists, published in The Saturday Paper, 10 June, 2017.

View/Download Copyright rules crippling artists _ The Saturday Paper [PDF]