[Technical] Should schools pay per view for URLs?

[Donna Benjamin]

Apologies for the cross posts. 

As significant users (and developers) of copyright material all
educators should be concerned about this development.

This article appeared in The Australian newspaper on Feb 28th. 
[1. http://tinyurl.com/f4a8b ]

"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"

Essentially, the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)
http://www.copyright.com.au/  is seeking to add a question to the survey
used to determine school copyright fees about web usage.  This could
have profound implications for how you use internet resources.

There's an excellent blog [2. http://tinyurl.com/k729a ] on the issue by
Kimberlee Weatherall at LawFont.com. Her analysis suggests CALs attempt
to include questions about instructing students to visit websites in
their survey to determine fee collection formula will be unsuccessful. 

I hope she is right. Her arguments sound sensible.

Nevertheless, voicing your concern to the state and federal ministers
for education and technology and attorneys general, as well as your
local members should be worth consideration.

The following site has a lot of education related copyright guidelines.
http://www.copyrightaware.gov.au/general/links.html
However, in my view, most of it is skewed in favour of copyright owners
at the expense of copyright users, ie teachers, researchers and
students.

When copying digital resources costs copyright holders nothing to
produce or distribute is it reasonable that more limited schools
resources be funnelled into their coffers?

A couple of other blogs [3 & 4] have also commented.

According to MCEETYA's submission to the parliamentary committee on the
digital agenda a few years back Schools are already paying in excess of
$40 million for copyright licensing. [5. http://tinyurl.com/l74yf (PDF)]

This effectively means school funding from Government is diverted from
schools to CAL for copyright payments. CAL is a private company,
operating the statutory licensing arrangements on behalf of the
government.

[1]
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18288580%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

[2]
http://www.lawfont.com/2006/03/03/shutting-down-the-internet-in-australian-schools-surely-not/

[3]
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/27/australia_copyright_.html

[4]
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060228-6285.html

[5]
http://www.phillipsfox.com/whats_on/Australia/DigitalAgenda/submissions/SRT-CAG_submission.pdf

-- 
donna benjamin - executive director
http://www.creativecontingencies.com/
ph +61 3 9326 9985 | mob +61 418 310 414
research - facilitation - web development