faircopyright.ca

Since I’m always going on about copyright law being too important to leave to the lawyers, it’s been heartening to see smart and active Canadians explaining how Bill C-61 would adversely affect their work. Genealogist John Reid points out, for example, that whereas now, researchers can presume that the subject of a formal portrait owned the rights, and that those rights expired 50 years after the photo was taken, C-61 makes the photographer the owner, and the term last until 50 years after his or her death. That makes miles of uncertainty for archivists and researchers. Photographs, unlike books, don’t have a “Cataloguing in Publication” page stating who made them. Even if we do know who the photographer is, how are we supposed to figure out when he died? Since C-61 is silent on reform of orphan works, researchers will be prevented from using a lot of old and rich archival material.

Then there’s Jennifer Smith, whose husband designs props and special effects for the movie industry. Her account of the ways C-61 would make it illegal for him to create a portfolio of his work is sobering and shows how ridiculous C-61 is.

But the thing that really sticks in my mind from this morning’s web browsing is this sentence from Internet learning consultant Harold Jarche:

“if you want your content to live a long, healthy and even diverse life, make it easier to hack.”

The whole purpose of teaching is to give people something to take away. You can let them carry it in their head — but heads get full and confused. A maximally effective teaching strategy leaves people with materials to trigger memory and enables them to adapt or innovate with those materials and pass them on, in original or altered form, to the next person they meet. This didn’t use to be so easy, but digital technologies give each act of teaching and learning the possibility of many lives. It’s truly an exciting time for education.

But C-61 won’t allow reincarnation. Its technology-enhanced learning provisions are based on the corporate approach to information management: one payment or enrollment = one use. No sharing allowed. Schools have to “take, in relation to the communication by telecommunication of the lesson in digital form, measures that can reasonably be expected to prevent the students from fixing or reproducing the lesson, or communicating it” (Section 30.01(5)c)). Similarly, the provision that allows librarians to digitize print materials for more efficient and cheaper transmission to patrons requires them to ensure that these materials evaporate within 5 business days (30.2(5.01)c)). I find this a sickening waste of tax dollars, and a sickening attitude to education in general. Instead of forcing teachers & librarians to build unsurmountable walls around educational materials and making it illegal to scale them, we should be encouraging the opposite. A slight broadening of fair dealing to ensure the legality of educational use of modest portions of copyrighted work — something our American friends allow in their own Copyright Act — would do the trick with minimal harm to rights-holders and no need for encryption software. Some educational organizations are happy that C-61 allows teachers and students to make use of unpassworded Internet materials (30.04). But this provision seems pointless, given that a) they already can do so according to current law; and b) they won’t be able to make reasonable use of digital materials in their school library because of C-61’s sacralization of digital rights management. If C-61 is passed, it will be illegal for a student to insert a clip of a purchased DVD or a photograph from a purchased digital encyclopedia into a school project.

In 1710, England titled the first copyright act “An Act to Encourage Learning.” And oh how much we’ve learned.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under C-61, Education, Libraries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.