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"Museums should end fees for public domain" by Michael Geist (Toronto Star)

Michael Geist extends the discussion of publicly-owned Canadian museums and their often outrageous admissions fees (24/7) into the area of those same museums and/or archives charging outrageous fees for materials already in the public domain or belonging to the public.

Tags: thestar, copyright, copyfight, museums, archives, access, fees, public_domain on 2008-04-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

L
ast week the City of Montreal hosted the annual Museums and the Web conference, which brings together hundreds of museum leaders from around the world. For the past 12 years, the conference has served as the focal point for the digitization of museum collections, artifacts and exhibits as museums open themselves up to new audiences and possibilities.
The dozens of presentations at the conference highlighted the remarkable transformation in how museums display their collections and interact with the public.
For example, the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal has poured significant resources into digitization, amassing more than 135,000 digital images that are freely accessible online. Similarly, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (which includes both that museum and the new Canadian War Museum) attracted a record 1.8 million visitors in 2006, but more impressively hit 66 million page views for Web-based content.
Many museums are using online video, social networks and interactive multimedia to pull content from diverse places to create "virtual museums." So, the museum community has emerged as a leading voice for the development of legal frameworks to facilitate digitization and avoid restrictions that could hamper cultural innovation.
Yet some fear the advocacy and actions of museums in embracing the Internet are not consistent, particularly in their policies on works for which copyright has expired.
Many museums receive regular requests for copies of works in collections to be reproduced in school texts, magazines or other publications. The fees vary widely. Some museums levy handling and/or reproduction fees and permission fees, despite the expiry of copyright.
the National Gallery of Canada appears to be taking the opposite approach, treating public-domain works as a profit centre.
The Access to Information Act records covered requests to the National Gallery for copies of public-domain artworks between February 2006 and January 2007. The gallery received approximately 250 such requests, and imposed contractual restrictions on use of the images and levied an average fee of $379.
Internal documents reveal the gallery often added hundreds of dollars to the total cost of fulfilling a request, despite the fact that the images were in the public domain. In fact, the permission costs for such works were actually higher than those for works still subject to copyright. The gallery reasoned that the copyright holder would apply additional charges.
Some dismiss these fees as a cost of doing business at a time when museums are struggling to make ends meet. The reality, however, is that the fees impede access to and use of Canadian culture and, ultimately, undermine claims for enhanced taxpayer support.
The time has come for Canada's museums to remove these costs and contractual barriers to Canadian heritage.
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- Hear, hear!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-17

The Lawyers Weekly: From A to Z: new developments in Canadian technology law

A fascinating A-Z compendium of new developments in Canadian technology law, by Michael Geist. Examples: "J is for the Jewish New Year cards Prime Minister Stephen Harper sent to thousands of Canadians. The cards raised uncomfortable privacy questions about the collection and use of personal information by Canada’s political parties." Or: "Q is for QuebecTorrent, the Quebec-based “torrent tracker” that was sued by a group of cultural groups on the grounds that the site facilitates copyright infringement." And: "S is for shaping, the controversial ISP practice that limits the bandwidth allocated to certain applications. The growing use of traffic shaping by Canadian ISPs led to mounting calls for net neutrality legislation."

Tags: canada, copyfight, law, michael_geist, net_neutrality, technology on 2008-02-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.lawyersweekly.ca

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It's time to overhaul copyright law | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Excellent points by Cory Doctorow on how "folk" copyright usage get eroded (sodded, more like) by corporate copyright law, and why that doesn't make sense: it's "a genuinely radical idea: [that] individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?). It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture."

Tags: copyfight, copyright, cory_doctorow, law, socialjustice on 2008-01-29 and saved by 7 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.guardian.co.uk

In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other kids.
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- - key phrase: "in theory" (how true)
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-29
Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.
They are also acting as though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the church basement.
This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).
It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.
We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.
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- - right on!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-29
A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.
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- See:
  http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/node
  and:
  http://www.wipo.int/portal/index.html.en
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-29

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Plan to modernize copyright law could make everyday habits illegal

Oh, fuck Canada, fuck the CBC, eh?:
"Mr. Geist also noted that in schools or libraries, the U.S. laws would prevent students from making copies of material they use for research purposes.

But he and some industry stakeholders have acknowledged that Canada should adopt some elements of the U.S. legislation that offer flexibility for the "fair use" of intellectual property. They say that under the existing laws in Canada, a person could be sued for producing a parody of a politician based on real images, sound or video, or even for recording a television program.

The restrictions recently prompted the popular on demand Internet video site, YouTube.com, to remove a parody of the former president of the CBC appearing at parliamentary hearings because of a complaint from the speaker of the House of Commons."

Boo-hoo, a speaker of the House of Commons commonly complained about a parody, and it had to be taken off YouTube? This takes the biscuit.

Canada, land of tutelage and lords, even if they are common as dirt.

Tags: canada, copyfight, democracy, internet_neutrality on 2008-01-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nationalpost.com

Jay Thomson, the assistant vice president of broadband policy for Telus, said the existing laws in Canada are also preventing his company from launching a new digital television recording service that would allow subscribers to tape their favourite shows for later viewing on a network server without having to use a VCR or Personal Video Recorder device.
"I'm certain that the vast majority of Canadians don't know that when they tape a program for later viewing using a PVR or even VCR that that is a copyright infringement in Canada, and they're potentially subject to a lawsuit for undertaking that activity," Thomson said. "It's not against copyright law in the U.S., it's not in Australia, it's not in Japan or the U.K., and it's been going on for decades here and shouldn't be a copyright infringement (here) either."
Mr. Thomson said Telus cannot launch this service until the government updates Canada's copyright laws.
"Instead of taping Boston Legal on their PVR that they paid $400 for and are trying to figure out how to use, they would be able to have a much more economical approach," he said. "The business case hasn't been worked out yet because the legal issues still have to be resolved but for example, maybe they'd pay a small monthly fee to rent space on the provider's server."
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- Oh Jesus H. Christ -- pay a fee to do this? g-d that.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-08
But Mr. Thomson does not agree with adopting U.S. copyright laws which could force Internet Service Providers to take down websites or online material of their clients based on allegations of a copyright violation before it is heard in court.
"We don't think that that system should apply in Canada, because it gives too much power to rights holders," he said. "It turns them into judges and juries."
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- - at least he's cognizant of that!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-08

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