Captain Copyright

» see captaincopyright.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

One sentence from the site's own terms of use does most of the work here: permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of, Access Copyright. That is a copyright education project for eight-year-olds, published on the open web, announcing that you need its permission to link to it and that the permission depends on being nice about it.

Captain Copyright launched in late May 2006. Access Copyright is the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, the body that collects reproduction royalties on behalf of Canadian publishers and writers, and the character was the front end of a classroom package of comics and lesson plans covering grades one through eight. The pitch was copyright literacy. The material was an argument, made to children, by a party with money riding on the outcome.

The objections came fast and they came from the people the package was aimed at. Michael Geist went through the lesson plans on 31 May 2006 and pointed out that there was no mention of private copying and no reference to user rights, which is the half of Canadian copyright law that matters most inside a school. Boing Boing had it on 1 June and Slashdot the day after.

In 2006 I was twenty-two and finishing an engineering degree in Ankara, in a country where the internet cafe economy had been running partly on downloaded MP3s for years and nobody was commissioning a mascot to explain licensing to anybody. That is the distance rather than a boast. What is portable is the instinct the Canadian teachers had, which was to read the worksheet before handing it out and to notice which side of the argument had paid for the printing.

~ the case file ~

~ the lesson plans ~

The complaint was omission rather than falsehood. The grade-school material taught that permission is needed to reproduce a work and left out fair dealing, the provision in Canadian law that lets students and teachers use material without asking for it. It discussed downloading and space shifting without mentioning the blank media levy, which is the reason Canadian law had treated some private copying differently in the first place.

There was also a structural problem with nothing to do with copyright. The same lesson plans were being handed to eight-year-olds and to thirteen-year-olds, and the site collected submissions from children without the parental consent notice you might expect to find. Geist's verdict on the package was that it was an embarrassment that should not find its way into any classroom, which is strong language from a law professor and was not contradicted by anybody outside the agency.

~ the linking clause ~

Two clauses in the terms of use did more damage than the lesson plans managed. One withheld permission to link from any site that might harm the agency's reputation. The other told visitors they were not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windows clipboard onto any other website. Both were being asserted by an organization whose entire subject was which kinds of copying are allowed.

Then came the part that finished it as a public exercise. The site had quoted the English Wikipedia twice on the subject of ISBNs without linking back or acknowledging the GNU Free Documentation License those quotes came under. More quotes turned up on closer reading. All of them were gone by 5 June 2006, and the agency's communications manager told a reporter that their inclusion had been an oversight. A copyright education site had been caught not attributing, in its first week, by its readers.

~ twelve weeks ~

Access Copyright pulled the initiative on 18 August 2006. The site stayed up as its own headstone for a while, and by 3 March 2007 it had been reduced to a three-paragraph statement saying the agency had come to the conclusion that the current climate around copyright issues will not allow a project like this one to be successful. Geist had already written the obituary that February. By March 2008 the domain answered with a 400 Bad Request, and in January 2013 it began redirecting to the agency's own site.

The climate the statement blames was made of teachers and librarians reading the material closely, which is what the material had asked them to do with everything else. Nothing was litigated and nothing was banned. A trade body wrote a curriculum, the people who run classrooms read it, and it was withdrawn inside three months.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »