Canadian Copyright Group Seeks To License the Net

An anonymous reader writes "A new Toronto Star article from Michael Geist not only describes why Canadian Ministers of Education are pushing a copyright proposal that will harm Internet access, but also reveals how a copyright group is seeking to create a new license for Internet content. Access Copyright, a copyright collective, wants to use a new international text standard to license everything from books to blogs. Geist outlines in his blog how Canadians can fight back against these bonehead proposals."

Comments

Re:Where's frist post

[KDR_11k]

What do you expect, with that kind of confusing headline and summary you have to RTFA just to get WTF they're trying to say. I mean, "license everything"? What's that supposed to mean, they claim ownership of every random thing on the internet?

Turns out the article says the ministry of education wants to allow schools to use all material available on the internet and be exempt from copyright that way. Guess someone didn't think about warez there.

The copyright group in question wants to offer content providers the option to use some kind of license for their stuff. Strikes me as idiotic since you can attach any license you like to your content without their help...

Scoop is sort of confusing

[RAMMS EIN]

This didn't become clear to me from the title or the scoop, but according to TFA, there are _two_ proposals; one by the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada that argues for an exception to copyright law that would allow schools to use online materials, and one by Access Copyright that aims to introduce a new licensing scheme for online content; basically, anyone can register works with AC, and AC can then license these to everybody.

TFA then goes on to say that ACs proposal is definitely bad, but, contrary to what the scoop suggests, TFA is mainly about the CMEC proposal. What it says is that educational use of online materials is already permitted under current copyright law, and introducing an "exception" that specifically allows it is going to have the negative consequence of making it seem that other uses are not allowed (e.g. fair use at home).

Re:Oh I get it...

[arose]

A series of tubes _is_ an acceptable analogy. No, it's not an _exceptionally good_ analogy (literally speaking), but it is certainly not below average.

Except that when you download a "WHOLE BOOK!" my tube doesn't get clogged because I'm on the other side of the planet--a network of tubes is very different from a series of tubes. Aside from that I'd like to think that /.ers use "tubes" as a reference to the general stupidity of the tubes speech, not just the tubes analogy.