Schools have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation's copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a website.
Teachers said students in rural areas would bear the brunt of cuts if the Copyright Agency was successful in adding internet browsing charges to the $31 million in photocopying fees it rakes in from schools.
The agency calculates the total due by randomly sampling schools each year for materials they copy, and extrapolating the results...."If it turned out we'd have to pay them, we'd turn the internet off in schools," the council's national copyright director Delia Browne said. "We couldn't afford it; it would not be sustainable. How on earth are we going to deliver education in the 21st century? How are taxpayers going to afford this." The move has teachers up in arms, with some warning "ludicrous" charges for using websites would increase the gap between haves and have-nots.
Comment. Australian members of Parliament: This is insane. Charging a fee for browsing, especially open-access sites, especially in school, will undermine education and research. And you plan to divvy up the collected fees among copyright holders who refuse to provide open access? Hello?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/28/2006 02:00:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
