• Ontario government values art & culture, but where is it in schools?

Getty Images

• Art Law Blog picks up on Getty Images’s acquisition by Hellman & Friedman for $2.4 billion.
• Howard Knopf comments on Getty Images’s cease & desist letters

Resale Rights

• The Intellectual Property office in the UK has released a report it commissioned into the impact on Artist’s Resale Rights on the UK art market
• An alternative report, carried out by an art market specialist was also recently published
• An article “Row over resale right grows – Collecting societies refute findings of latest survey” that outlines collecting societies/copyright collectives response to the alternative report.
• Resale Royalty Rights for Australia’s Visual Artists (PDF)
• The Copyright (Artists’ Resale Right) Amendment Bill to insert a new, stand-alone part to establish a resale right for visual artists in New Zealand.

Orphan Works

• CAPIC on The Orphan Works Debate in the US
• Orphan works bill clears Senate committee, may soon find home

The conference will take place at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, 78 Queen’s Park, Toronto, Ontario. Further details will be posted to our website at www.innovationlaw.org as available.

The conference is free of charge, and all are welcome. Advance registration is required; you may register by email to centre.ilp@utoronto.ca.

This event is sponsored by the CILP’s Microsoft Law and the Information Society Project.

Centre for Innovation Law & Policy
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
78 Queen’s Park
Toronto, ON M5S 2C5
(t) 416-978-3724
(f) 416-978-2648
centre.ilp@utoronto.ca
www.innovationlaw.org

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.

Original post follows:

Before I start, I need to let you know that I’m a little disappointed.Not even from the fact that this machine is not as sleek as the Eee, because what it lacks in sleekness it makes up for in cuteness. But some aspects of the design are puzzling, regardless of the fact that it is meant to be an educational tool.

First, and most frustratingly, the keyboard requires MUCH pressure for the keys to register. I don’t mean that I simply can’t touch-type, but I actually have to press down on many of the keys, and sometimes pound down on them. It reminds me of the days of yore when typewriters were still being used. Seriously, my arms are tired and I’ve barely written three paragraphs (ed note: this post was drafted in the Write program in the XO, but the final edit was done on my Toshiba M300). I can’t imagine how difficult this would be for a child who conceivably has less developed muscular strength. And remember—I’m a stone-sculptress!

More keyboard woes:

1. The CTRL key is where the CAPS key normally lives, and there is no CAPS key.
2. The space bar is difficult to use.
3. The backspace button is labeled “erase”
4. The keyboard is off-center, with the bulk to the left.

Perhaps I have a defective unit, because the right-click button for the touchpad doesn’t do anything. Neither does tapping the touchpad. I do think it’s cute for the left-click button to be marked with an X and the right-click to be marked with an “O”…but the cuteness doesn’t really help the functionality problem.

The SD card slot is in a very odd space below the monitor. It can only be accessed by swivelling the monitor counter-clockwise. Although my Sandisk 512MB SD card was recognized by the XO, my Sandisk 512MB Cruzer Micro (USB drive) was not.

The “ears” are very secure in their homes, and I was a little worried I might break them while trying to unfold them. One is more secure than the other, and I scratched a finger the last time I tried to get it open.

Power, RAM usage and wireless activity indicator lights are on both sides of the monitor/top. I have not yet tested all of the buttons, but the Neighbourhood View/Group View/Home View/Activity View buttons on the keyboard are handy, and the screen rotation button works well.

If I hadn’t spent time on the OLPC News Forum, I wouldn’t have known to look for expandable media in the Journal. I suppose that’s something which would be taught to students and educators, but it just seems like a strange place for them.

The word processor does the job, and I’ll be looking forwards to the next Sugar release which fixes the file format problem. Again, I would need to visit the OLPC News Forum to figure out how to save files to removable storage, because it doesn’t seem very intuitive.

The paint program was quite basic and mimics paint programs. I could not figure out how to resize or save images (I clicked the “Keep” icon, but don’t really know what it did because I was afraid to make any changes to my original).

The built-in browser had positive and negative aspects. Positive: to maximize screen space, the address bar shows the page title when the cursor is not in that field. Negative: many functions do not work (for example, I tried to upload a photo into Photobucket, but the “Browse” button did nothing). Many users have switched to Opera, but the flimsy built-in browser is a disappointment, especially when it’s supposed to be a version of Firefox.

The Sugar interface needs some work, because it isn’t entirely intuitive. When hovering the cursor above an icon, the text which appears is sometimes a tooltip/label and sometimes a menu option. There is no visual clue indicating the difference. The bar of Activities along the bottom are bookended by scroll icons for the left and right. When you are at the leftmost bar of Activities, the left scroll icon does not change and does not loop you back to the next bar of Activities. The same goes for the right side.

A startup/shutdown time comparison (building off my post about the Eee’s UI). Note that the shutdown time of the XO is based on a hard shutdown using the power button. I have not yet been able to find a shutdown option through Sugar:

Nicholas Negroponte has been quoted as saying “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”

What I’m having difficulty understanding is how a keyboard which requires the same amount of pressure as a typewriter, a right-click button which doesn’t do anything, a touchpad which doesn’t respond to taps, a browser which doesn’t respond to websites the same way as the rest of the world and a user interface which doesn’t have visual cues for info-only/event-option icons is acceptable for and/or helps education.

Perhaps the resulting frustration is supposed to give students an incentive to make things better… but there are plenty of other problems for them to be solving, I think.

I’m hoping my faith will be restored after I spend some more time with the device, and when I how kids react to it compared to me. But, for now, I’m glad I bought the Asus Eee.

The XO is damned cute, though! Here are a bunch of pictures:

More specifically, some of the main/reoccurring issues identified were:
-visual arts literacy (or visualcy, a termed being used by NAVA), especially compared to visual arts exposure
-educational standards and priorities for visual arts
-education not only in institutions, but also through artist-to-artist mentorships
-education at the K-12 level, both as integrated programs and specialized schools for the arts
-reaching a wider audience and allowing the general public to feel more comfortable in galleries and with art
-how can the arts community shift their thinking and practices to satisfy the public’s appetite for art
-the need for the arts sector to be recognized as having real financial weight
-how to build a stronger bond between the art being collected and the art being exhibited
-the need to document and publish catalogues and other materials on collections and exhibitions
-space issues when it comes to collecting and exhibiting
-financial constraints for collecting new works (Allan McKay of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery said that about 90% of newly acquired works, overall, are donations)
-how to make private collections and permanent collections more accessible (McKay here offered a more astounding estimate that 95% of a gallery’s collection is usually warehoused)
-engaging artists in the acquisition and exhibition process

There was also some discussion about the possibility of using new digital media as a possible solution for some of the issues of accessibility, education and preservation of works. Although these opportunities are very exciting, there is much yet to be discussed around the administration of these issues, and how much we really are reaching out. Alternative venues such as Facebook, Second Life or an independent website are great. But they are still inaccessible to the Canadians living in rural areas without an internet service to support the amount of information to be transmitted (if they have any access to internet services at all), and without careful planning we would soon end up having to rethink the issues again, or to need to convert everything to another format.

I also wonder, as did Jeffrey Matt, what other cultural industries face as issues of literacy and accessibility, and what they’re doing to address those challenges. Both composers of classical music and authors & writers certainly must face these issues to some degree–what are they doing about it?

I’m very curious to see what comes out of tomorrow’s discussions and closing remarks, and what will happen with all of this discourse after the conclusion of the Summit.

Throughout today’s panel discussions and smaller discussion groups, it was very apparent that it is problematic for the Summit to be the first in over 40 years. If the Summit had a different agenda, it would have been extremely useful for simply gathering a list of all many the things which need to be addressed in the arts community and collecting names of people who were willing to tackle the individual issues in smaller, more focused groups. As it is, we have been charged with the task of identifying key issues, propose policy changes to address the issues and make recommendations for creating support for resolving the issues. The task is hugely daunting, considering that this meeting of the minds does not happen more regularly.

There is certainly no lack of enthusiasm, interest or passion in what is happening right now. The resonating concern I’ve heard from my fellow delegates is on the lack of strong focus or clear direction. Although this lack of focus and direction is very unfortunate, I think it is a natural result of the fragmentation of the community which has occurred and which has been mirrored by the fragmentation of the network of support for arts and culture within the government. I’m really seeing a need for us to look at what other artist communities have done (and here I’m thinking primarily of NAVA) and bring into our community methods and perspectives which are useful and relevant to us.

I can hardly believe that everything we discussed today did in fact happen within a single day. This morning, we discussed education, access, interpretation and audiences. Each one of these issues could be a summit discussion unto themselves—and this was merely the morning! In the afternoon, we discussed the myriad of issues related to collecting and exhibiting art (and, more specifically, Canadian art).

My personal summary of the issues boil down to the matters of intellectual, physical and financial accessibility of art. Although I identified these constraints when we were discussing education and audiences, I think it applies equally from the perspective of galleries, curators and researchers (although some repositioning of the intellectual accessibility would have to be made to apply it from a research vantage, rather than one of direct interpretation of the work).

(continued in VAS Day 2 Further Thoughts)