tianjara.net | Andrew Harvey's Blog

This is old news but I've been meaning to write at least something about it.When I did my HSC back in 2007 I found that there were no comprehensive notes for my subjects that suited me. That's no surprise to me, in fact I think most people would find that they to have not found a set of notes that already exists and suits them perfectly. So I wrote my own. I used as many different and variety of sources that I could find and I merged these together into a set of notes that I could understand and reread if I ever forgot.

I made them available here, http://andrew.harvey4.googlepages.com/, or here if you prefer a simple directory listing.

Initially I released them as "all rights reserved", with a disclaimer allowing reproduction for non-commercial use. Since then I've licensed them under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

One thing I did when I was studying and writing my notes was to build upon the works of others. However this was difficult with the current copyright laws and the licensing of most of the material I used. So I had to change it enough to be new works that were not derivatives. Hopefully under this licensing of my notes I will save some others the trouble and allow them to take works that already exist such as my notes and change them or take extracts or add to them to produce and publish a set of study notes that suite their needs, without the need to be breaking the law and risk legal threats.

The license is one thing, but it's still hard to add to my notes to make your own derivative version if I only supplied a PDF version. So to fix this problem I've released the source document (Microsoft Word, sorry but this is what I started it in) so that anyone can easily build upon my work.

Out of all the rights that the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) grants me, there are at least two that I think all copyright owners should not waiver (most of the time). Those being two moral rights from the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (part IX, division 2-3), the right of attribution of authorship, and the right not to have authorship of a work falsely attributed. I agree these should definitely be part of the act I'm glad they were recently added.