Bill C-61 is a copyright law that is truly scary to anyone that shares what they teach online.

The following is an e-mail I received from Kris at http://wanderingink.net She is 16 years old. Bold font is mine, for those that only want to skim…

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Fair Copyright Montreal (a branch of the same group I participate in) posted a full analysis of Bill C-61, the proposed Canadian DMCA.  But don’t click on the link yet, I want to highlight something first.  Read the link afterwards and shake your head at how much these people are stuck in the 20th century.

The bill has a special section for “Lessons”, new copyright laws that apply to the classroom.  Are they exemptions?  Special permissions?  NO.  I personally read the text of the bill that applies (section 30) and decided that Fair Copy Montreal had the best summary, which I’ve posted below.

Here they are, the new copyright laws for education in Canada.  Read all of it.  Emphasis is mine.  Note: when they mention students, it’s impossible to claim “everyone is a student” as a loophole.  In fact, they supplied their own greviously outdated definition in the text of the bill: “a student who is enrolled in a course of which the lesson forms a part is deemed to be a person on the premises of the educational institution when the student participates in or receives the lesson by means of communication by telecommunication.”

Read the following new laws with that exclusive definition of “student” in your mind:

What educational institutions are allowed to do:
Broadcast lessons if the broadcast recipients are exclusively students (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 3)
What educational institutions are not allowed to do:
Print more than one copy of any digital reproduction communicated in a lesson (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 2)
Use a work from the Internet if the website or the work has any form of technical restriction (Clause 18, section 30.04, subsection 3)
What educational institutions must do:
Destroy lessons 30 days after the final course evaluations have been given out (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph a)
Take measures to ensure that students exclusively may receive lessons (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph b)
Take measures to ensure that students may not copy lessons (Clause 18, section 30.01, subsection 5, paragraph c)
Take measures to ensure that any digital reproduction cannot be communicated to anyone else outside the institution (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph b)
Take measures to ensure that any digital reproduction cannot be printed more than once per person that has received the lesson (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph c)
Take any measure prescribed by regulations for any copied digital reproduction (Clause 18, section 30.02, subsection 3, paragraph d)

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Can you see what a huge STEP BACKWARDS this is for 21st century education in Canada?  It makes everything that you do illegal.  Confining “copyrighted” learning to people who are on the physical premises… what a 20th century idea!  I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with this unless they at least make an exception for distance education, but even then, this bill is so counter-productive!

Think about those universities like MIT and Berkeley that broadcast their lessons for free over iTunes or their own websites to whoever just wants to learn.  That is exactly what is going to become illegal, at least in Canada.  How are Canadian universities going to be able to compete for students in a global market if they can’t let anyone on the outside take a look in?  Canada is going to lag behind if our government can’t adapt its laws for the 21st century.

They’re going to be voting on the bill THIS September when Parliament is back in session.  The NDP is on our side, but the Liberals are so far uncertain.  The Conservatives are a lost cause – they’re all going to be voting YES on this as a party (because it’s a bill introduced by the Government).  The Bloc Quebecois will probably be voting with the Conservatives.  The bill could go either way depending on how much pressure there is from the public.

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you a portion of my concern over this new copyright bill. Read the rest of the analysis if you like and find the other reasons to be concerned, but I thought I would bring this one to your attention because it strikes so close to home.

If you think this is appropriate reason to be concerned and if it’s not too much to ask, do you think you could forward this email to other web 2.0 educators or anyone else in Canada that would be interested?  I want to raise as much awareness as possible about this new bill among the people it would effect.  If you’d like more information then let me know and I can give you some more links or explain it to you myself.

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Thanks for sharing Kris! Please share this information with anyone you think might care, or contribute to preventing this Bill from stiffling education in Canada!

Brian Lamb adds more about this here: Bill C-61 locks us into a closed education model.

Also, you might want to keep an eye out for Michael Geist’s blog until this is settled. Here is his Bill 61 tag for all his posts on the issue.