Dan McGuire

We are in interesting times here in Canada. It appears that a proposal for an  amendment to our Copyright act is going to be presented in the very near future. So far we have had an announcement from the government that an amendmaent was going to be tabled in December of 2007, which led to a groundswell protest against the amendment - so far it appears these protests have been succesful, as there has been no sign of the proposal.

http://sfu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6315846683

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2647/125/

In this atmosphere of uncertainty we have stakeholders coming forward with their christmas wish lists. Some of these statements are laughable, some have no hope of considerastion and some are down right dangerous.

The most dangerous and in my opinion mis-guided proposals comes from the Council of Ministers of Education, requesting an special exemption within the copyright act for the use of the internet in education.

The statement itself is available here:

http://www.cmec.ca/copyright/bulletins2008/note-01.en.pdf

Several scholars, far more worthy than I have commented on this statement - Sam Trosow, a law professor comments at http://samtrosow.ca/content/view/27/2/

- Howard Knopf's Excess Copyright blog is a must read:

http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2008/01/a-contrario-scenario-cmec.html

http://www.caut.ca/uploads/EducationReviewvol10no1-en.pdf

A Timely publication, and one which i will use to close off the offical part of this workshop,

Thanks You for your time, I do have a few more posts - and will always welcome your questions,

Dan

dmcguire@sfu.ca

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Friday, 1 February 2008, 03:32 PM. Corrected link -- had some extra stuff in it for some reason :-))

I hope you found  "A Fair(y) use Tale' as informative as it was entertaining.

It does give a fairly good overview of the concepts underlying Copyright law, It is probably a good idea to run through what I see as the essentials!

Copyright protects creative works. The opposite view of this, is that copyright does not protect things that are not creative. A fact is not protected by copyright - so no royalties for 'the sky is blue'. One interesting twist of this concept is that a person who makes a copy of a work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, cannot claim the copyright on that work. The Mona-Lisa has been in the public domain for centuries - if you take a photo of the Mona-Lisa that is nothing more than a reproduction, then your photo is in the public domain as well. If your photo of the Mona-Lisa has some new creative element to it - special lighting, or some added framing, then you could claim copyright for THAT photo.

 To infringe copyright, you have to copy something. Copyright law regulates who can make exact reproductions of works. Before something can be protected by copyright, it has to be recorded or 'fixed' in some form. As an example, a sponanteous dance that is not recorded is not protected by copyright. If you wanted to copy that dance  - how would you do it?

Copyright protects the expression of an idea - not the idea itself. This is probably one of the most important concepts, without it copyright would strangle any cultural development. Think of how rich the person who came up with 'boy meets girl' would be if an idea could be protected by copyright!

 There is an amusing anecdote floating around on the web. An author contacted W.W. Norton requesting guidance on what portion of a W.W. Norton book could be quoted without seeking permission from Norton. The response was that any use of text from a Norton publication would require permission.  Does this mean that using the word 'THE' requires permission from Norton?  The answer of course is no. Copyright protection does not apply to 'insignificant' portions of a work.

So, with these concepts in mind...was A Fair(y) Tale legal??

While i agree that there are some issues with the short 'downloading is stealing' - I can't support the arguments presented by 'I wouldn't steal'. First downloading movies via un-authorized channels is illegal...hence the term illegal downloading. The authors of this video object to the film industry lobbying for changes to the law, they object to the film industry producing propaganda....all the while using propaganda to lobby for their own changes to the law.

Sharing is awesome, and i support that 100% - but i also acknowledge that i can only share my ideas and my work - I have no right to share YOUR work for you.

I am still amazed this video is still online....