In a frank admission, CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay said this afternoon that there are contradictions in the CBC’s copyright and licensing rules.

Keay said that he stands by the general direction that he and other CBC staff outlined yesterday; namely that it’s okay for bloggers and other writers to quote and excerpt CBC material, and they can continue to do that free of charge.

Although this essentially contradicts the CBC’s Terms of Use, Keay said the terms are going to reviewed. “We’re going to take a close look at it,” he said, “The objective is to bring some clarity and some consistency, and to ensure our brand is properly protected.”

“The guiding principle is to have the rules of use and the restrictions of use as unambiguous as possible so people know what they’re getting into when they use this stuff.”

The confusion started over the weekend when a number of bloggers noticed a new licensing option on CBC News and sports stories. The new system also described restrictions on using CBC content, such as “any content (text, photos, interactives, graphs, audio and video) found on CBC.ca can only be reused elsewhere with the permission of CBC.”

Many bloggers pointed out that these restrictions could stifle online commentary. Jesse Brown said the rules are “wildly out of step with the culture and language of the Internet itself… these demands and requirements are ignored daily by thousands of Canadians freely sharing CBC content,” Brown wrote on the Search Engine blog.

We’ll see what happens after the review, but until then I have to give the CBC credit for how open they’ve been during the process. In the span of 48 hours a problem was pointed out, raised with the brass, and now it’s going to be reviewed. The quick response and transparency are commendable. Hopefully that will carry forward into the review process.

	8 Comments »	Email This Post
	Licencing	Posted at 6:17 pm (02 Feb 2010)

Can bloggers quote and excerpt CBC material or not?

That’s the question Jesse Brown and others are wondering in light of the introduction of a new copyright system at the CBC.

The confusion stems from comments yesterday from two CBC spokesmen, Chris Ball and Jeff Keay, both of whom said essentially the same thing. “People can make use of excerpting or linking,” Keay said yesterday on the phone, meanwhile Chris Ball wrote on his blog:

You’ll still be able to excerpt from stories originating from CBC.ca. If you’re writing a blog post and want to quote one of our stories, you can.

The problem is that this technically contradicts the CBC’s explicit terms of use (the full cap is theirs):

ANY USE, REPRODUCTION, ALTERATION, MODIFICATION, PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OR DISPLAY, UPLOADING OR POSTING ONTO THE INTERNET, TRANSMISSION, REDISTRIBUTION OR OTHER EXPLOITATION OF THE WEBSITE OR OF ANY CONTENT, WHETHER IN WHOLE OR IN PART, OTHER THAN EXPRESSLY SET OUT HEREIN, IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF CBC/Radio Canada.

Further Ball links to the CBC permissions page that is intended to clarify the situation, it says:

Any content (text, photos, interactives, graphs, audio and video) found on CBC.ca can only be reused elsewhere with the permission of CBC.

So can bloggers quote and excerpt CBC material then? The permission page also says:

Under certain circumstances, it is permissible to quote or take an excerpt from a CBC.ca article; however, prior permission is required before using any CBC.ca text in this manner. Please submit a Permissions request for our consideration.

So the answer seems to be that bloggers can quote and excerpt material from the CBC, but “prior permission is required.” Now Ball said yesterday if you want to quote a CBC story you can,  what he didn’t say is that you need prior permission. So are the rules you can quote BUT… only with prior permission. If that’s the case, it’s a significant shift in policy, at least on paper.

Which brings me back to Jesse Brown and the million dollar question:

Given that these demands and requirements are ignored daily by thousands of Canadians freely sharing CBC content, and since these demands and requirements are wildly out of step with the culture and language of the Internet itself, does the CBC actually intend to enforce these rules through lawsuits targeting teachers, students, non-profit organizations, and individual Canadians, who are expected to aid the CBC in this pursuit by informing on each other?

Finally, to add to the confusion, it’s worth noting that under Canadian copyright law, and its fair dealing provisions, you may not legally need prior permission to quote, but that depends on how much you’re quoting, and what the context of your work is. Is there a lawyer in the house?

By the way, I didn’t get permission to use any of the quotes in this post.

Note: I’m waiting to hear back from Jeff Keay for some clarification, once I hear I’ll update this post with his take on it.

Please share your thoughts on this issue, leave a comment below.

	3 Comments »	Email This Post
	Licencing	Posted at 1:42 pm (02 Feb 2010)

A new system to protect copywritten (copyrighted?) content on the CBC News website is causing some anger.

A few months ago the CBC introduced a licensing system that allows users to legally post all of parts of CBC News and sports articles on their own sites – at a hefty fee. The price for posting one article externally for one month is $250.

“We’re not doing anything we haven’t always done. People can make use of excerpting or linking, that’s always been free of charge,” CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay said on the phone this afternoon. “But what we’re really doing and what we’ve always done is to protect our brand from inappropriate use.”

But the system has its critics.

This morning in Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow called the system a “bizarre joke.” He noted that iCopyright installation on cbc.ca linked to a SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) site that is offering a reward of up $1,000,000 for reporting copyright violations.

^{Link to an industry association site, with a possible reward.
The page has since been changed on the CBC installation}.

On the Canadian Media Policy Portal, a blog about media policy and regulation, Cameron McMaster said the prices for legally using CBC material are prohibitive.  (For more see Cameron McMaster’s post on how the system works and the prices). McMaster notes the system also seems to caps the number of times you can print a story at five and he’s involved in a Facebook group that has sprung up to oppose the initiative.

“My question is why would anyone even click that licence button at all, when they can copy and paste and printscreen? Are those actions trackable?” McMaster asked. Well it turns out that yes, they are.

In addition to the iCopyright system, the online news division also recently introduced a second unrelated system that tracks what and how often readers copy and paste material from the site.

This system, called Tynt Insight, collects anonymous data on how many people are copying content on cbc.ca, how many words have been copied, what is being copied. The system is unrelated to the licensing effort, and is a pilot project.

“Nothing to do with licensing,” Keay said, “We use it as another tool to track site use and to provide a helpful link back to our stories.”

Tynt bills itself as a “completely new way of looking at how people view and consume content on the web, while retaining their complete privacy,” the company’s blog says. The blog also notes that the average length of the copied content is about 140 words, which it says falls “within the margin of “fair use” from a copyright perspective.”

However this also implies that the reverse is true. The Tynt script, which is on CBC news pages, can track when whole articles are being copied and how often that happens, so it could be used as a tool to monitor the frequency of copyright infringements, although it offers no way to remedy those infringements, because the offenders are anonymous.

Keay says there is no conspiracy theory here. He says the iCopyright system is more about saving money for the CBC than anything else and it’s unrelated to Tynt. He said the CBC previously would have to manually handle the license requests, which was slow and time-consuming, now with the iCopyright system, it is automated.

McMaster said in a blog post yesterday he was disappointing with the move:

It’s a real shame that the CBC has taken this road of revenue generation, but the real problem is that it is underfunded and has to compete with private broadcasters on the television end, and media conglomerates that own newspaper websites.

	15 Comments »	Email This Post
	Licencing	Posted at 5:43 pm (01 Feb 2010)

We learned yesterday that the Corp has inked a deal with APM for the Canadian rights to its extensive catalogue of library music — currently at 250,000 tracks. (The agreement lets us use APM music on all CBC/Radio-Canada platforms and on any third-party “platform” with whom CBC has a contract.)

At first, I was super-excited! ‘Finally,’ I thought, ‘We can download the songs right from our desktop!’

See update, below.

Because the current process of getting music on air seems downright quaint by today’s technology standards. Here is the process.

• Search for it in a slightly temperamental database (but a huge improvement over the past days’ Prolog, which was invented in 1725)
• Write the spine number(s) down on a little piece of paper
• Walk to the music library in your building (down four storeys for most CBC Radio shows in Vancouver)
• Find the CD
• Take it into a little booth and record it manually (i.e., in real time) into Dalet or check it out and rip it at your workstation
• Walk back down to the library to return it.

No, it’s not arduous work, but when you’re under deadline and you need a five-second SFX cut of a hockey crowd, it can be painstaking and often those fine production values you know you’re capable of get dumped because there’s just not enough time.

So when I saw the announcement of us licencing APM music, I figured — great! Most music is digital already (read: iTunes) so now we can just download the tunes!

No dice. We can download “sample” tracks (i.e., not broadcast-quality) and get metadata. But when you need the actual song, get on your walkin’ shoes because they’re on CDs in Toronto (and regions that asked for them).

Why, in this digital world, is this still happening? I’m assuming it’s because of some obscure set of rights the publishers maintain, but really, I’m stumped. It makes sense for the publishers (huge savings from not having to distribute CDs) and licencees (huge convenience improvement.)

What am I missing here?

UPDATE: Turns out the licence agreement is for production music only and not commercial music. That’s certainly a huge step forward — not just that we can download needledrop to our desktop, but more importantly the rights we have now extend to every platform. This includes, finally, both podcast and broadcast rights. (Many radio producers, including myself, made two versions of their pieces — one for broadcast and one for podcast because we had separate rights agreements for each platform.)

	6 Comments »	Email This Post
	Licencing	Posted at 11:24 am (30 Apr 2008)