Krell
February 28th, 2006, 11:18 AM
Contributed by Carlo (http://www.techdirt.com/search.pl?author=Carlo) on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 @ 09:29AM
from the guess stupidity has a creative commons license dept.
Schools in Australia currently pay photocopying fees to the country's Copyright Agency for materials teachers copy and distribute to students, but now the agency wants them to pay for using the Internet in lessons (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18288580%5E15343%5E%5Enbv%5E15306-15318,00.html) as well.
A group representing schools says the charges could lead some of them to just pull the plug on their Internet connections, which could cause serious problems, particularly for students in rural areas that have come to rely on it for access to educational materials. It's unclear, though, exactly what the problem is here, or why the copyright group feels they should be paid, and this seems like an awfully aggressive twisting of the idea of copyrights.
With photocopies, the material is being duplicated, but that's not the case -- in theory, or in fact -- with materials on the Internet. If something's put on the internet and made freely available, even if it's copyrighted, it's quite a stretch to somehow translate that into a demand that the content producer should be paid every time somebody looks at it, but only if a teacher pointed them to it.
Well, maybe there's a flip side to this: if you're reading Techdirt from the confines of an educational institution, expect to receive your bill shortly.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060228/0919214_F.shtml
.
from the guess stupidity has a creative commons license dept.
Schools in Australia currently pay photocopying fees to the country's Copyright Agency for materials teachers copy and distribute to students, but now the agency wants them to pay for using the Internet in lessons (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18288580%5E15343%5E%5Enbv%5E15306-15318,00.html) as well.
A group representing schools says the charges could lead some of them to just pull the plug on their Internet connections, which could cause serious problems, particularly for students in rural areas that have come to rely on it for access to educational materials. It's unclear, though, exactly what the problem is here, or why the copyright group feels they should be paid, and this seems like an awfully aggressive twisting of the idea of copyrights.
With photocopies, the material is being duplicated, but that's not the case -- in theory, or in fact -- with materials on the Internet. If something's put on the internet and made freely available, even if it's copyrighted, it's quite a stretch to somehow translate that into a demand that the content producer should be paid every time somebody looks at it, but only if a teacher pointed them to it.
Well, maybe there's a flip side to this: if you're reading Techdirt from the confines of an educational institution, expect to receive your bill shortly.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060228/0919214_F.shtml
.