Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Why Copyright?

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Dec 03, 2008

Originally posted on Half an Hour, December 3, 2008.

Point form notes from Michael Geist's talk this morning in Ottawa.

Why has copyright become a 'cool' issue? Reasons:

Advocacy
- people organizing themselves online
- facebook groups
- twitter campaigns, etc
- examples

Government 2.0
- 2001 copyright consutation - 600 responses was huge
- today - British - "Ask the PM"
- other forms of interacting with public
- government blogs, government Facebook accounts

Our Digital Future
- Iron Sky - amateur production - alternativ funding
- Flickr and other content uploading - Facebook
- Culture - eg. Tetes a Claque
- CBC using BitTorrent

Our Knowledge
- Crowdsourceing - Wikipedia, wikitravel, etc.
- Wikitravel press - 400 page guide - POD - new, fresh
- Encyclopedia of Life, Project Gutenberg, Librivox
- Open access,
- the Canadian journal Open Medicine - editorial independence
- Open Journal System

Our Education
- open education - OpenCourseWare
- Moodle, open source software, BitTorrent
- Open books - more people buy the book if it's freely available

Our innovation
- the justification for copyright always seems to be innocation
- but we see company after company flourishing in Canada under current copyright

Our Consumer rights
- what we can do with CDs - listening to it with the device of our choice
- region coding - wanting to view media purchased elsewhere
- ebooks and ebook locks
- cell phones - it would be an infringement to unlock your cellphone to swicth carriers c-61
- is about copyright choices
- we could have chosen to move toward flexible fair dealing
- eg. by adding the phrase "such as" to the list of allowable circumstamnces
- eg. television recording "time shifting" - vs broadcast flag
- anti-circumvention provisions prevent fair use/dealing
- c-61 was, for all intents and purposes, a copy of DMCA - but worse


Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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