Captain Copyright for kids
p2p news view / p2pnet: John Degen posted his thoughts on Captain Copyright last week.
The character is silly, dumb, over-the-top and even, dare I say, derivative (in the critical sense). And I love him. I have a Captain Copyright sticker on my laptop… and I had vowed to never put a sticker on my beautiful little computer, but this guy is too great. He is way cooler than Elmer the Safety Elephant. I hope someday he too gets his own flag.
In the past few weeks I’ve been thinking why I felt such negative emotions about Captain Copyright taking flight. Here’s my thinking, and I’m curious to learn what other people have been thinking.
I think suggesting you can teach current copyright law and related issues to children in grades 1-8 belittles those of us who’ve dedicated large amounts of our lives to this area of law. It reminds me of how frustrated I was reading the Government’s Section 92 report where it prioritized copyright revision issues and listed “clarifying and simplifying the Act” as the last bullet on the lowest priority for the government.
I believe this should be the first priority of the government, and an overriding policy that directs any other change to the Copyright Act.
Today’s reality is that the most experienced practitioners in copyright law get this area of law wrong every day, with copyright lawyers disagreeing on how to interpret existing law. There were mistakes on the Captain Copyright site which could easily have been corrected through peer reviewers sending bug reports to the authors. Instead, they became public articles.
I believe people were trying to alert potential audiences to the idea that if “The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency” couldn’t get these issues right, it’s unreasonable to suggest children under the age of 13 could understand and discuss them.
And clearly it’s inappropriate to suggest these young children be encouraged to write letters to the editor in support of Access Copyright’s narrow views on coyright.
If Captain Copyright had a 14+ target audience, and didn’t contain suggestions that children should become free labour for Access Copyright special interest lobbying, I think I would have been far more supportive.
When I was in high-school I took a law course and even then I was interested in software copyright. While I don’t think I could have discussed the types of issues that Access Copyright is proposing as the concepts were far too complex, I think this is the right age to start to get children involved.
Access Copyright indicated on their site that they intend to expand to discussions about Creative Commons and other licensing system alternatives to collective licensing or the “permission culture” (Lessig’s wording, not theirs). My hope is that there’ll be a way to simplify some of the economics behind these alternatives such that as high-school children grow up, they’ll be able to make informed choices about their own creativity. They can choose whether they wish to charge royalties for their work, or specific uses of their work, and whether to join a collective. They may also choose to charge the up-front development costs, allowing the marginal price (the royalty rate) to be equal to the marginal cost for creativity which is zero.
There’s so much work that needs to be done before any of this is possible. I am currently in a public discussion with Christopher Moore who’s a director at Access Copyright.
While I believe that Moore is a smart individual (I like his reminders on Senate Reform), and that he has the interests of fellow authors at heart, we’ve had a hard time discussing the problems for protecting creators’ rights when collective societies such as Access Copyright extend beyond being a voluntary (repertoire-based) collective.
We’re two people who have dedicated very large parts of our lives to this topic, and we’re theoretically on the same side of the debate: trying to protect the rights of creators.
But if the two of us can’t understand each other or agree, how can it be reasonable for primary school children to do so?
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
Also See:
Captain Copyright – Canada’s Captain Copyright, June 1, 2006
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June 15th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Gee, the main accent colors of the Captain’s outfit are Green and Gold, so we know what he is all about. If fact, I wonder who the genius was to come up with that incredibly cynical idea for his outfit. I would think if they wanted something that appealed to children they would have come up with something more accessible they could relate to rather than a smarmy, squared-jawed, superhero cliché that more resembles something of an updated version of a steroid-abusing caricature of Dudley ‘Dianabol’ Do-Right who looks like he’s about to scold everyone to eat their vegetables (and supplements).
June 16th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
The other issue, which the cartels absolutely do NOT wanted tested in court, is whether or not the statutory damages specified in Title 17 USC (Federal Copyright Laws) violates the “excessive fines” clause of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution. Normally the clause applies only to bar the Government from levying excessive fines (i.e., a $500,000.00 fine for littering,) but it also has applicability in a civil proceeding where parameters for damage awards are specified by staute. In this case, although the money is awarded to the copyright holder as ‘damages’, it’s intent is as a deterrent, as would be a fine. The copyright holder need not present evidence as to actual damages but must provide argument to justify what they’ve requested as such deterrent ‘damages’ in an infringement case.