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61 Reforms to C-61, Day 48: Education Harms – Lessons Must Be Destroyed After the Course

In addition to the prospect of new liability, the lesson provisions include a series of draconian conditions that undermine rather than facilitate education.  For example, Section 30(5)(a) provides that the education institution is required to:

destroy any fixation of the lesson within 30 days after the day on which the students who are enrolled in the course have received their final course evaluations;

I am not making this up.  Bill C-61 requires teachers that utilize this educational exemption to destroy the lessons that they have created for their courses with one month of the conclusion of the course.  Teachers must recreate the lessons each year which obviously establishes a strong incentive to run as far away as possible from these new "rights."  If the government is serious about supporting education, it will drop this embarrassing condition from bill.

13 Comments

  1. As a university-level instructor, this angers me so much. I spent years assembling together my lesson notes into fancy presentations that I can constantly add to, revise, and adjust every new semester. It took many hours of my own time to get things just the way I wanted them, and the quality of my hard work shows – I always get glowing evaluations and encouraging comments from my students regarding my notes.

    If this bill passes, I’ll be forced to delete it all? That is absurd! That will mean that between every semester I will have to rush and put in many extra hours to hastily throw together new presentations? You know what? That will get very tiresome, and I can see the quality of my notes and classroom presentations declining rapidly as new classes come and go.
    What good is a law that forces one to reinvent the wheel multiple times over?

    I think I’ll just type everything out onto overhead transparencies and get the students to copy it down word-for-word, because there’s no value in putting any effort into my work with this stupid provision.

  2. STUPID JOKE
    I strongly doubt how those people, who want to pass Bill c-61, has been well-educated or not. Evidences have been shown that most of them have no common sense for technology, the use of Internet, education, and etc.

    If you are not allowed to keep the notes from school, how the knowledge could be well used?

    People can keep all the knowledge learned from school memorized in your brain.

    Even god will say that it will be a stupid joke.

  3. Isn’t this just a wee bit out of context? This provision is part of a long series of amendments and this applies to material which would otherwise infringe copyright. So, what it’s saying is that you get to use the exception once, and then either you recompile the “lesson”, or you get permission to use the excerpts. This in in fact very similar to how the US fair use classroom exemption works. What this provision does NOT do is in any way affect what teachers do with non-copyright material (i.e. their own notes, as opposed to someone else’s) or notes that students take. I realize that there is an instinctive hostility to any copyright model that involves payment for use, but at least present the facts fully and honestly.

  4. Isn’t this just a wee bit out of context? This provision is part of a long series of amendments and this applies to material which would otherwise infringe copyright. So, what it’s saying is that you get to use the exception once, and then either you recompile the “lesson”, or you get permission to use the excerpts. This in in fact very similar to how the US fair use classroom exemption works. What this provision does NOT do is in any way affect what teachers do with non-copyright material (i.e. their own notes, as opposed to someone else’s) or notes that students take. Nor does it apply to face-to-face teaching, only distance education. I realize that there is an instinctive hostility to any copyright model that involves payment for use, but at least present the facts fully and honestly.

  5. Keith Rose says:

    context
    I don\’t agree that the missing context supports your claim. The definition of lesson in paragraph (1) includes anything \”that would otherwise be an infringement of copyright but is permitted under any of sections 29.4 to 29.6 and subsection 29.7(3).\” It doesn\’t say anything about distance learning. There is a separate statement in paragraph (3) that it is not an infringement to communicate the lesson (for distance learning), but this has no bearing on the requirements of paragraph (5).

    In fact this amounts to a (new) limitation on the educational exemptions provided in section 29.4 – 29.6, and it would apply to all fixations, including the flip charts and overhead slides that were originally allowed by those exemptions. That may not have been the intent (at best this is unclear), but that is what the bill requires.

    You are correct to point out that these requirements don\’t apply to students. They get to keep the material — unless compliance with (5)(c) prevented them from preserving a copy in the first place.

  6. context
    Thanks Keith, I was wrong on the distance education point.

  7. Fire with fire
    @1: Possible solution to problems caused to professors by Bill C-61:

    1) Involve students into creating and revising course materials.
    2) Make those available under GFDL or Creative Commons. It does not have to stay within one university, as students from many universities may contribute.
    3) And do not force students to buy expensive textbooks. The publishers of said books were involved in crafting this bill and hurting them in where it hurts is a great approach.

    I am talking about this:

    [ link ]

    as well as this:

    [ link ]

  8. Open Courseware
    MIT supports Open Courseware where many of the lecture notes used in or handed out in classes are available on the web outside the institution. Those notes inevitably contain figures, tables and graphics from texts, research papers, and other source material that falls well within “fair use”. When I taught there, and later here in Canada, I always made my notes available on a server I ran in my own office and many of my colleagues did too. Sounds like c61 would make that illegal. Consider a course in contemporary music or film to name just one sensitive example. Can you imagine taking your entire web site down as soon as you’ve finished marking exams?

  9. Keith Rose says:

    Open Courseware
    There are several problems for Open Courseware in paragraph (5), beyond the requirement to destroy the lessons. In fact, of the four sub-paragraphs, the only one that isn’t explicitly hostile to Open Courseware is the last — and that’s because it empowers regulations that don’t exist yet. Not only must the lessons be destroyed, the educational institution must: “take measures that can reasonably be expected to limit the communication by telecommunication of the lesson” to students who are enrolled in the course, or other people “acting under the authority of the educational institution”; and take “measures that can reasonably be expected to prevent the students from fixing or reproducing the lesson, or communicating it other than as they may do under this section.” In other words, making this material available to the general public is forbidden; and imposing some kind of DRM is arguably required, depending on how one interprets (5)(c).

    However, it is important to note that this applies *only* to material and uses that would infringe copyright if it weren’t for the exemptions “under any of sections 29.4 to 29.6 and subsection 29.7(3)”. So, if for example the material is covered by an appropriate license, or the use is otherwise authorized, these requirements don’t apply.

    In practice, I expect Access Copyright would very much like to extend its license offerings in the educational space to cover just this circumstance. So, really, things would probably just go on as one would expect, with some additional money changing hands. Whether it is in the public interest to require educators (and consequently taxpayers, in the public education sector) to pay a license fee for material that was formerly freely usable (in some specific ways) under the education exemptions is, at least, debatable.

  10. Biggest problem
    There are and always will be legitimate differences of opinion on copyright law. Basjing the recording companies and textbook publishers is unhelpful. Most of the people who work there are doing a good job and are perfectly decent. Their industries depend on copyright, and while you might disagree, no more see why their products should be partly free than a restaurant expects you not to have to pay for part of the meal, no matter how hungry you are.

    Having followed these discussions, I think that the biggest problem with Bill C-61 is that it is very badly written. Much of it is so unclear that even law professors can’t explain its meaning. What I suggest was needed was a policy paper that set out what was to be in the Bill. Once that was clear, the draftying would surely be much easier.

  11. “There are and always will be legitimate differences of opinion on copyright law. Basjing the recording companies and textbook publishers is unhelpful.”

    If they didn’t want their law bashed they should not have written it, or paid Prentice and Harper to write it.

  12. If you’d bothered to read the next paragraph, you’d have seen that clearly they didn’t write it. If they had, it would be understandable.

  13. Study: DRM a major barrier to e-textbook
    Here is an article on ArsTechnica:

    [ link ]