Terry Pedwell, Teachers, publishers at odds over proposed copyright changes, Globe and Mail, April 16, 2005. Excerpt: 'A battle has erupted between educators and publishers of Internet materials over proposed changes to Canada's copyright law. Teachers are worried they could face lawsuits for distributing material downloaded from the Internet to their students. But rights holders say legislating open access to the Internet would mean they won't get paid for their work...."Teachers, school boards, any educational institution potentially could be open for lawsuits," said [Harvey Weiner of the Canadian Teachers' Federation], who would like to see Ottawa legislate free access to public materials in cyberspace. "What we're asking for is clarity."...Provincial education ministers, outside Quebec, are pushing for the legal change, arguing that there should be free access to anything deemed publicly available and free of charge on the Internet. "If you put something on the Web because you want people to use it free of charge, this is what we want the right to do," said Nova Scotia Education Minister Jamie Muir, who heads a copyright consortium on the Council of Ministers of Education, of which Quebec is not a member. "The current legislation, technically, does not permit that."...[Weiner] said teachers don't want free access to material sold on the Internet, but only to material publicly available and free.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/16/2005 09:58:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
