faircopyright.ca

You might have heard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Small specialized school. Well, a few years ago, in an attempt to buff its reputation, MIT instituted OpenCourseware. Slogan: Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds. Every lecture and course reading at MIT is online. Anybody in the world can take an MIT course.

You might wonder how MIT keeps in the black: well, it only gives diplomas to admitted paid-up students, so its main product (sorry to be blunt, but diplomas are the main products of universities) is unaffected. Well, not unaffected: its value has undoubtedly gone up.

Whether you’re a kid in Thailand or a senior in Alaska or a teacher with no textbooks in Sudan, you can learn about any academic subject via MIT if you have an Internet connection. And here’s what you can do with the course notes and videos you find:

Through MIT OpenCourseWare, MIT grants the right to anyone to use the materials, either “as is,” or in a modified form. There is no restriction on how a user can modify the materials for the user’s purpose. Materials may be edited, translated, combined with someone else’s materials, reformatted, or changed in any other way.

It’s a noncommercial license: you can’t go out and sell the material. But you can go.

Now, inevitably, we get to Bill C-61. It says kindly that an electronically transmitted lesson will indeed count as a lesson in the eyes of the law. But it wants this lesson to behave just like a classroom lesson: when it’s over, it’s gone. The educational institution has to destroy it 30 days after marks go out (30.01(5)(a)), and must “take measures that can reasonably be expected to limit the communication by telecommunication of the lesson” to enrolled students. It must also do what it can “to prevent the students from fixing or reproducing the lesson.” Read that last one again: the Bill wants to make it impossible for distance-education students to keep course materials. Yes, that’s what it says.

Now I suppose if you used no copyright material in your class you could ignore this clause, and go ahead, podcast, post notes online to the world, etc. But if like me you teach literature, and have a nasty habit of actually quoting it along the way, this provision of the Bill says you have to lock up your lectures. People will have to go to MIT to learn about American Literature — and they can even take that course in Chinese.

The preamble to the Bill declares that “Canada’s ability to participate in a knowledge economy driven by innovation and network connectivity is fostered by encouraging the use of digital technologies for research and education.” Some existing distance education programs will be take C-61’s exception/limitation package as encouragement — there are permissions teams out there who will be able to take on other responsibilities if this Bill passes — but it traps us in a very limited vision of education, at just the time that technologies permit vast new possibilities.

I was raised on the ideas of the Antigonish Movement of adult education and group action, and I can’t help asking: Why not harness digital technologies to enable educators to reach out across distances within Canada and beyond? Why not demand a copyright law that will support this more open approach? A combination of fair dealing and collective licensing could work, if there were goodwill, imagination, and a level playing field for negotiations. I don’t want tiny frosted windows of exceptions: I want clean picture windows of clear principles for conduct.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 6:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.