iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

The Conservative party’s take on Copyright reform, Bill C-32, is working its way through the parliamentary process. The last two copyright reform bills in Canada have died on the order paper, so it’s about time we revisit copyright as the Conservative government looks long in the tooth.

The Bill C-32 Legislative Committee has invited Canadians to share their views. The Committee has set the following parameters, as summarized by Michael Geist:

In order for briefs on Bill C-32 to be considered by the Committee in a timely fashion, the document should be submitted to the Committee’s mailbox at CC32@parl.gc.ca by the end of January, 2011. A brief which is longer than 5 pages should be accompanied by a 1 page executive summary and in any event should not exceed 10 pages in length.

www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5577/125/

I couldn’t write that much, but I thought I’d take an other opportunity to send my thoughts on the need for an educational take on fair dealing (fair use) that deals with only who has access and not how (dead trees versus electrons) and doesn’t suggest that anyone should help enforce a company’s “digital lock”.

Here’s what I’ve sent to my MP and modified for the committee. I encourage you to send something similar to your member or parlament and perhaps to the committee.

Honourable Ms. Raitt
Member of Parliament for Halton

Dear Ms. Raitt,

I am writing you with respect to Bill C-32, Canada’s copyright reform bill. I want to urge you to help ensure a fair approach to Canadian copyright works used in education and that respects the rights of those who purchase copies of copyrighted works. I would further urge you to ensure that the Canadian government does not create a copyright regime that centres around fundamentally flawed concepts and technologies that create “digital locks”. This type of approach is no more appropriate than when politicians first tried to control access to the printing press.
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I am not a lawyer, and I am not prepared to give legal advice. That said, here are some general practices for dealing with copyrighted works that respect the tradition of academia and are influenced by the current realities in Canadian intelectual property developments. This is the same advice that I’ve been giving my Interactive Arts and Sciences students in the two courses I teach at Brock University.

Three important principles are:

Access Canada (formally CanCopy) which gives educational exceptions to copyright does not apply on-line, only to some paper-based situations.
The distinction between “taking” or “making” a copy versus referring others to an artifact is very important.
“Fair Dealing” (“Fair Use” in the U.S.) is not well defined. There are exceptions for small portions of a text for educational use or satire etc., but there is no set amount. Canadian judges have not created a test, like a percentage, for all types of media. However, for practical reasons many individuals and institutions have chosen “workable” number with the advice of legal council.
Linking:

Linking is almost always a good idea. Many court cases in the US and Canada have held that you are not liable for directing people to something hosted/posted by someone else that violate copyright. For example, showing a YouTube video posted by someone else should not leave you liable. Additionally, most of the library’s agreements with journal providers insist students are linked to the articles, NOT downloaded and redistributed.

Reuse:

Reusing artifacts, or otherwise including images and other media from the web. Any explicit prohibition from reusing work trumps anything else; an image with a copyright logo or ‘not for reuse’ message would unsurprisingly prevent reuse. In the absence of those types of messages, using a work with a citation *should* be fine.
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Shortening URLs like bit.ly/warningwarning are a bad idea, filling a real need, that seems like it’s not going to just go away.

URLs like mattclare.ca/blog/2010/03/18/warning-about-url-shortening are descriptive, help service like Google but they are way too hard to remember and take a long time to type into a web browser. Services like tinyurl.com , snipurl.com, bit.ly , ow.ly and others provide a short URL that will re-direct users to the longer version.

Google even created their own shortener at goo.gl which, according to the official Google blog:

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

This was handy a few years ago, and once Twitter took off with its 140 character limit URL shortners took off with it. Most of these services now offer stats on how many clicks a URL has received — perfect for the follower count obsessed Twitterati (I mean that in a positive way – I promise).

The Danger!

The danger with URL shortners is you don’t know where you’re going to end up. With a URL like cbc.ca or mattclare.ca/blog/2010/03/18/warning-about-url-shortening or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening you have some idea of the reputation of that URL before you follow it. You can identify the domain, see if you know it, some times you can determine if you’re going to arrive at a web page, an image or a PDF document, etc. URL shortners obscure all of that.

This problem of this opaqueness was best demonstrated by the phenomenon of rickrolling. A (debate-ably) worse outcome is individuals clicking the short URL could be redirected to a malware/spyware site. While web browsers like Internet Explorer can be compromised just by visiting URLs this is a bad idea!
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Brock University’s documentation for Isaak, Brock University’s Sakai-Based Learning Management System (LMS), is maintained within a wiki at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai. This wiki is intended to be a practical, readable, guide that is aware of the context that instructors use Sakai/Isaak for teaching at Brock University.

What follows I had actually hoped to present on this at the last Sakai Conference. Brock University is not a member of the Sakai Foundation, but had intended to become one, as such the ambiguity made it hard to register.

Brock University offers only a few on-line or distance courses and as such Brock’s LMS functions primarily as an additional channel of communication; content distribution; and community for otherwise face-to-face courses based at one of the two physical campuses. This amounts to slightly more than a thousand courses with faculty responsible for their own course spaces with complete control over it. The responsibility for assisting instructors in their development of on-line course content falls upon myself and the other important members of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) at Brock University.

The CTLET strives to offer a high level of support through: one-on-one consultations, workshops, E-Mail dialogues and phone-based support, but one thing is certain; every instructor cannot expect that when they need help with Sakai/Isaak that they can pickup the phone and get someone immediately. If the answer to every question about Sakai/Isaak could only be found at the other end of a telephone the ability to distribute critical information would be severely limited and it would represent a considerable bottleneck.

Personal one-on-one help is important and very effective, but it is also resource intensive to deliver. University technical and pedagogical support staff work conventional business hours, however, instructors need not work from their office nor work conventional business hours. These are schedules and locations that do not always compliment each other.
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I feel badly that I missed this, but I was so busy at the time.

John Graham-Cumming’s petition to have the British Government apologies for the homophobia that lead to the conviction of Alan Turing for the “Mental Illness” of homosexuality was successful!

Alan Touring worked during the Second World War for the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. His work helped crack the German Enigma code, an advantage that made a huge impact on allied strategy and ultimate success.

As a professor at the University of Manchester and Cambridge he was influential in the development of computer science and developing the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. His Turing test was the original benchmark for determining artificial intelligence.

The Turing test is basically a test where a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. If the judge can’t tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The T in CAPTCHA (those squiggles on websites to confirm if you are human or not) stands for the Turing test: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Lastly the Turing programming language, developed in 1982 at the U of T, was the first programming language I was taught…… well it was only named after Turing, so we can’t hold that against him.

In 1952 Turing was convicted of the crime of homosexuality. Instead of two years of prison or hard labour he accepted the alternative punishment of being injected with female hormones. The percussion and mental and physical effects of the female hormones (and I’m sure much more) drove him to commit suicide in 1954 by eating cyanide poisoned apple.
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