Heritage Committee recommends banning educational use

I was at first inclined to disregard the reports I saw of this report, because I thought it was the same thing as the interim report I've already read and commented on. But it isn't, it's new, and it's fairly horrifying. Specifics below.

The Heritage Committee has recommended immediate ratification of the WIPO treaties (bad!), normalization of photographers' copyrights (I have no problem with that), ISP liability and a "notice and takedown" regime, that educational users should be permitted to use "publicly available" material from the Net, but that "publicly available" material should only be material which carries a specific notice saying it is for public use - so the vast majority of Web sites would become illegal to use in education. Furthermore they recommend yet another "collective licensing" scheme à la CANCOPY for educational use of Web material; more collective licensing for inter-library loans; they make a general statement that the whole thing is really important; and recommend deadlines of 15 August for a memorandum to cabinet and 15 November for introduction of legislation to implement it.

Note that there's one significant way it could be worse: they don't specifically recommend anything about DMCA-style enforcement of technological protection measures (TPMs), beyond the general support of WIPO ratification. Bizarrely, the discussion of TPMs is all under the "inter-library loans" heading. One howler on page 19: "The research community is confident that sufficient technological protection measures exist to ensure that the recipient of copyright material cannot forward it to others or make more than one copy." I don't know which "research community" they mean. Not the computer security research community, that's for sure. But the recommendations they do make are plenty bad enough. Michael Geist has an interesting Toronto Star column discussing the nasty consequences of the "publicly available" definition in particular.

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Heritage Committee recommends banning educational use

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