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.

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