Clearing Up the Copyright Confusion
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.
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Thanks for the follow-up.
Agreed – nice to the CBC moving so quickly.
Hope they also clear up the terms of use around linking TO the CBC site http://bit.ly/ciW1WV Claiming that you can prevent someone from linking to the CBC is like claiming you can prevent them from giving driving instructions to the CBC’s buildings. It’s hopelessly silly and disturbing.
This is really too bad. This didn’t need to happen in the first place. The CBC should have simply modified the iCopyright pages according to their needs (and to Canadian copyright law) before invoking the terms on their website.
Why the CBC would have considered ICopyright in the first place is troubling.
1) ICopyright appears to only recognize American copyright law.
2) ICopyright sounds like a Tony Soprano concept – read their website carefully.
3) The CBC is partially publicly funded – if the CBC wishes to limit the use of material it produces, it should decline public funding.
I looked into ICopyright and some of it’s competitors about a year ago, and was not impressed. I personally don’t expect any of them to last very long.
“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.”
As pointed out by Mike over at techdirt, http://techdirt.com/articles/20100202/1848558018.shtml. I agree with him that Keay doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying.
What we are discussing here are “copying and reusing”, which is related to COPYRIGHT. Protecting “brand” really is about TRADEMARK. Either Keay doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or the law is being misused(unintentionally or intentionally), or Keay and the group who wrote up the new TOS is not communicating properly.
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Now, some personal opinion.
I LOVE the CBC. I love how I can always rely on it for news. I love how I discover new music and new CANADIAN artists (whom no commercial radio gives any time to). I can remember just 2 days ago telling my U.S. friend how we’ve got the CBC and they’ve got nothing that’s like the CBC.
With that preface, I have to say I am disappointed at the new TOS/policy. CBC is created with the intent to promote Canadian culture and art. If we use common sense, you don’t increase the knowledge/usage of anything by increasing the obstacles. Imagine you have to fill in 3 forms for each book you check out at the local library. Could you say that the library is promoting knowledge and encouraging people to learn?
Yes, CBC needs to give credit when it’s due so everyone knows what kind of good work they are doing. This helps them get funding by saying “We did this and those and that, that’s why it’s important to give us funding!” However, it’s a fine balance to promote itself, or to make access difficult so substantially less people use CBC.
And I pray for them to find the right balance, with all good intentions.
If the CBC is producing content partially using public funds, it has a duty to the public to maximize the value of said content.
Obviously a lot of the iCopyright stuff is questionable in the context of how stuff gets used for non-commercial purposes on the Internet. On the other hand, if the CBC’s copyrights weren’t defended to a level required by due diligence there’d be very little to stop an unscrupulous organization taking the Corporation’s output lock stock and barrel and exploiting it for commercial gain, without giving anything towards its creation. This would dilute the value of said output, and reduce the CBC’s ability to produce it in the first place.
This is one of those situations where – at least in the short term – nobody will be entirely happy with the outcome. It’s a result of collision between the old creator-consumer media models and newer ones that blur the lines and emphasize participation, but the old models are still in play and can’t just be ignored.
“If the CBC is producing content partially using public funds, it has a duty to the public to maximize the value of said content. ”
To the people that haven’t already paid for it, sure.
it’s worth mentioning that the CBC is not wholly funded by taxpayers. Taxpayers cover about 2/3 of the CBC budget, the rest comes from other sources such as advertising and licensing. In fact, licensing CBC content for educational material and other uses has been a source of revenue for many years.