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The European Commission hosted an information session
for non-governmental groups on Europe's current trade negotiations. The
Canada - EU Trade Agreement was the first discussed. Both Ends, a Dutch
NGO, reports
that European officials indicated that they are still unhappy with the
Canadian position on copyright and patents. While the disagreement of
patents for pharmaceuticals is well known, Canadian officials had
indicated that the copyright provisions were completed. Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Newsfeeder, Reddit, StumbleUpon, TwitterTagsShareTuesday January 22, 2013 |
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The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples
with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist
who left a remarkable legacy for a 26-year old. Swartz's contributions
are used by millions of people every day as he played a key role in
developing the specifications for RSS (which makes it easy to syndicate
online content), Creative Commons licences (which makes is easy to make
creative works freely available), and the popular website Reddit.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that while much of the immediate focus has centered on mental health issues,
draconian computer crime laws, and the bewildering prosecution of Swartz
for downloading millions of academic articles - a U.S. prosecutor was
seeking as much as 35 years in jail despite the fact that Swartz did not
benefit from the downloads and the source of the articles did not want
to pursue legal action - the more notable legacy was his effort to make
information more openly and freely available.
Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Newsfeeder, Reddit, StumbleUpon, TwitterTagsShareTuesday January 22, 2013 |
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Appeared in the Toronto Star on January 20, 2013 as
Internet Activist Death Places Spotlight on More Open Access to Information
The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples
with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist
who left a remarkable legacy for a 26-year old. Swartz's contributions
are used by millions of people every day as he played a key role in
developing the specifications for RSS (which makes it easy to syndicate
online content), Creative Commons licences (which makes is easy to make
creative works freely available), and the popular website Reddit.
While much of the immediate focus has centered on mental health issues,
draconian computer crime laws, and the bewildering prosecution of Swartz
for downloading millions of academic articles - a U.S. prosecutor was
seeking as much as 35 years in jail despite the fact that Swartz did not
benefit from the downloads and the source of the articles did not want
to pursue legal action - the more notable legacy was his effort to make
information more openly and freely available.
Swartz aggressively pursued initiatives to increase the availability of
information, particularly scientific and legal documents. His efforts
were controversial, yet they point to mounting expectations that public
information (or information funded by the public) be made easily
accessible.
In recent months, there have been some important developments in Canada
in furthering Swartz's vision. The Canadian Institutes of Health
Research, the federal government's health research funding agency,
recently launched a new open access policy that requires funded
researchers to make their peer-reviewed publications freely available
within 12 months of publication. Given the millions of tax dollars
invested in CIHR research annually, the mandatory open access policy
should ensure that the public has access to the cutting-edge health
research it has helped fund.
Open availability of legal materials is also fast becoming the standard
in Canada. The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), which is
Canada's leading source of free legal materials, now houses more than
one million court judgments as well as tens of thousands of legislative
documents from all Canadian provincial, territorial and federal
jurisdictions. Canadian lawyers, who pay an annual fee to maintain the
site as part of their dues, provide the financial support to ensure that
CanLII is sustainable (I am a CanLII board member).
After years of limited progress, digitization efforts in Canada are also
beginning to bear fruit. The Internet Archive Canada, which has teamed
with academic libraries across Canada, recently announced that it has
digitized over 400,000 texts in Canada. Although relatively unknown, the
Internet Archive Canada now boasts the largest online collection of
Canadian public domain materials since virtually all copyright-expired
books in the University of Toronto library have been digitized and are
freely accessible and downloadable.
The question facing many Canadian institutions is what comes next. For
academic research, the CIHR open access policy should be emulated by the
other federally funded granting institutions so that all
taxpayer-funded research features a requirement that the resulting
publications be made openly available to the public within months of
publication.
Access to legal materials has been a major success story, yet much more
can be done. Legal publishers are beginning to make some of their texts
freely available and law schools may soon rely on free, online cases as
their primary source for legal casebooks. As those materials gravitate
online, the pressure is likely to mount to ensure all Canadian cases and
statutes are freely available, thereby granting the public full access
to the law.
Yet perhaps the biggest step may come as part of efforts to move
digitization efforts beyond public domain works toward the creation of a
national digital library featuring millions of Canadian titles. Such an
initiative would undoubtedly face implementation challenges with
respect to copyright (it would likely rely on the newly expanded fair
dealing laws), but the vision of universal open access in Canada seems
increasingly possible and is consistent with the vision to which Aaron
Swartz dedicated his life.
Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and
E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can
reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or online at www.michaelgeist.ca.
Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Newsfeeder, Reddit, StumbleUpon, TwitterTagsShareTuesday January 22, 2013 |
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