Julianna Yau’s blog

• Sam Trosow – Educational Use of the Internet Amendment: Is it Necessary?
• Howard Knopf – The “A Contrario” Scenario & CMEC
• Christopher Moore – When they say they don’t want a free ride, you know they want a free ride…
• Metaphaze – Quicky Links

The Council of Ministers of Education recently posted a press release (PDF) on Changes to the Copyright Law Must Include An Amendment to Address Educational Use of the Internet (also available in French).

Although they start with clarity by highlighting the problems of educational use of materials under current copyright law, they make the surprising comment that anything provided online by content creators is free if it is made available without password protection. Pressing even further, they seem to be supportive of protection of copyrighted materials to a much more draconian extreme than even creator lobbyist groups suggest:

“Free stuff” refers to material posted on the Internet by the copyright owner without password protection or other technological restrictions on access or use. “Free stuff” is posted on the Internet with the intention that it be copied and shared by members of the public using the Internet. It is publicly available for anyone who wants to use it, but the current copyright law may not protect schools, teachers, or students even when they are making normal educational uses of this “free stuff.”

This is an absolutely shocking statement, because I (and I believe many other creators) provide their “stuff” online without “without password protection or other technological restrictions on access or use” because I want to allow free access to the work and to not unnecessarily hinder any fair dealing of the work. I do not understand how, or support the argument, that by not employing “password protection or other technological restrictions” I am automatically releasing the work as royalty-free content. I sincerely hope that the statement made by CMEC was intended to address educational use only, which is currently an exception carved out in the Copyright Act.

…the federal government needs to change the Copyright Act to make it clear that this “free stuff” is available for all educational uses. …rights holders can opt out of the amendment by using passwords or technology that limits access or use of the Internet material. Rights holders can also opt out by informing Internet users that the material cannot be used for educational purposes.

Although I recognize the need for a better administrative system for educators to access works which are truly available royalty-free, I don’t believe this is the best way to achieve it. The Creative Commons licenses already exist and are in wide use (the content of this blog, for example, is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License). While I do think that creators should be allowed to use TPMs, and allow the market forces to decide whether that is a viable business model, I’m unsettled by the thought that I would need to employ TPMs to lock out educators, or somehow meet a set of criteria for clearly marking work as not being available for royalty-free educational use.