CAUT Copyright Conference-Notes

The Canadian Association of University Teachers hosted a conference this past weekend (October 27-29) titled “Controlling Intellectual Property: The Academic Community and the Future of Knowledge.” it is published in digitalelectric


Michael Geist: Copyright and Control in the Digital Age
Cancopy law, CMEC's Copyright Matters!; Captain Copyright (Access copyright)
-these are very similar - you don't see user rights in there; it's as if SCC decisions never happened
-education needs a new vision of copyright
-The good news story: blogs, myspace, postsecret, flikr,
-knowledge sharing, wikipedia, wikinews, project Gutenberg, MIT open courseware,
-the incentive s are different from traditional copyright incentives
-CIHR policy on open access, nature peer review online trial, Alouette Canada - open digitization project
-all kinds of open source software
-SCC reshaping of view of copyright from Theberge, CCH,

The bad news:
C-60 will be revived in worse form
-tepid gains for education
-WIPO & problems for security researchers
-insufficiency of fair dealing - Telus has been talking about this
-StatsCan hadn't taken open licensing as a category in its innovation analysis bulletin
-education exception might drive a wedge between AUCC and students, librarians

What to do?
-not focus on an internet exception
-DRM - this is the main issue on which education will lose money
-open access models
-open licensing
-expanded fair dealing
-use CCH
-drop internet exception
-focus on digitization - build national digital library - do more than Alouette - Google concerned about getting involved as result of our laws
-get rid of crown copyright
-freeze copyright terms - there is already a consultation document on extending it
-focus on contractual limits - contracts must reflect principles....