Europe May Take DeFacto Control of How the World Uses the Internet

While the United States will still own much of the hardware that the Internet runs on, Europeans are taking a serious look at how we use it by harmonizing the copyright laws of its member countries related to creative content online. While some of what is being negotiated is legalese, for teachers and kids there may be important changes in the wind. Here's short list and what it may mean :

1. Copyright owners are going to be encouraged to make content available online with the confidence that piracy will not cannibalize the economic value of the underlying works.
    
2. Procedures will be created to make clearing content easier and less expensive, including the ability of third parties to use works for whom the owner of the rights cannot be located (so-called orphan works).
    
3. A standard of conduct will be formalized between access/service providers, rights holders, and consumers to encourage legal use and access of creative content and to discourage unauthorized file sharing.

As the Europeans create a common copyright policy for its member countries, the European Union will have to tackle issues that are hampering the activities of entrepreneurs, creators, educators and consumers. The solutions the European Union creates will serve as a guide to other countries, and perhaps the de facto legal framework for the Internet as the digital frontier continues to develop. Should be an interesting ride...but anything that can simplify the copyright and Fair Use laws is welcome.

Copyright Protection: Needed or Futile?

We've written extensively in this blog about the no-nos of copyright, fair use and piracy, but not much about the evolution of copy protection in a digital world. One of the best discussions of the subject has been in recent posts in the Bits blog of the New York Times between Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, and Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. If you have any interest at all in the subject - which all teachers should just from an awareness standpoint - you might take a peek at the entries. What I found of most interest was the idea of fair use taking on a "no harm" clause. In other words, if you use a small segment of an artist's song for example and there is "no harm" done by it - in other words, their sales are not going to be hurt by it - then it may be permissible to use it under evolving fair use standards. Would love to hear comments on this as this issue is going to have great impact on teaching and learning in the future.