Digital Copyright Canada

For those who did not know, Access Copyright, which represents a limited subset set of Canadian creators and publishers, has proposed (and will likely be granted) a yearly per-student fee for the use of photocopiers by schools. This increase will set the rate to $45 for Universities, and $35 for other educational institution, multiplied by the full time equivalents (FTE). (For details, read this PDF)

I have some sympathy for the economic situation these organizations find themselves in.
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While I have this sympathy, I don't see what this has to do with Copyright.

Read Full article on IT World Canada's blog...

My first draft of the op-ed for Georgia Straight was far too long, and included not only discussion of digital locks but also commentary about government imposing royalty-based business models. It also used Georgia Straight articles by Bill Henderson and Marian Hebb as illustrations. I'm including here that last part that needed to be cut out of the op-ed.

A recent addition to the CAUT site under "Intellectual Property": Fair Dealing (No. 3) (Intellectual Property Advisory, Dec 2008).

From an announcement:

This advisory is significant because it combines both the internals and externals of copyright policy-making; it links together the federal legislative agenda with policy-making at the local institutional level. In this piece, CAUT is calling on colleges and universities to codify robust fair dealing practices in their institutional policies, and they are also setting forth a four-part legislative program to insure that any new copyright amendments enshrine the CCH principles.

There is an interesting article by Gale Holland in the Los Angeles Times talking about the "eye-popping costs" of college and university textbooks. Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee offers a solution, which is to create textbooks that can be freely distributed given the bulk of these costs come from copyright costs and the costs of largely unnecessary intermediaries. McAfee "finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices".

Read the rest of this entry on IT World Canada's blog »

Article linked by Gavin Baker

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) comments on C-61.

Bill C-61, the federal government’s proposed amendments to the Copyright Act, drastically restricts access to electronic documents and online material. If passed into law by Parliament, the amendments will represent a major setback for the interests of teachers, librarians, students, researchers and consumers.

One of the most common themes you will see in the Copyright debate is different people using the same terminology to mean entirely different things, and never really noticing that they aren’t talking about the same thing as they argue. It is coming up on 7 years that I’ve dedicated to trying to make sense of this, which is why I’m writing so much about copyright.

While I have hinted at language problems around the term “technical protection measures” or TPMs, I will talk about this confusion in the context of a debate you may be less familiar with: Educational use of the Internet.

Read full article on IT World Canada's BLOG.

There was talk in the GOSLING mailing list about the so-called "Data Liberation Initiative (DLI)" from Statistics Canada. It provides universities and colleges with a special case for freely available information from Statistics Canada.

For the record, I am entirely opposed to DLI for the same reason I am opposed to the various institutional exceptions to copyright being proposed by CMEC and Access Copyright. Schools are the LAST places in our society that should have rules that are different than the rest of society.

The following was submitted as a reply to Copyright protects writers' livelihoods, by John Degen.

John Degen is correct that any discussion of changes to Canadian copyright brings out the usual suspects. I am a software author who has spent much of my volunteer time since the 2001 copyright consultations talking with fellow independent creators about the direction of proposed legislative changes, and a very different direction that would be beneficial for creators.

A SFLC press release includes:

In response to a formal request filed by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today ordered re-examination of the e-learning patent owned by Blackboard Inc.
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A re-examination of this type usually takes one or two years to complete. Roughly 70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked.

A cNet news.com article by Anne Broache talks about a controvercial e-learning patent.

The Software Freedom Law Center has asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate all 44 claims of the Blackboard patent.

The news release from the Software Freedom Law Center includes:

In a free society, there is no room for a monopoly on any part of the educational process, said Eben Moglen, Executive Director of SFLC and Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University. We are confident that there is enough prior art for the Patent Office to open, re-examine, and ultimately revoke all of the patent's claims.