I was playing the Captain Copyright quiz game for children. Captain Copyright is a new initiative launched by the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Among the lessons taught by the 10-question quiz:
- A family with 3 computers should pay for 3 copies of Microsoft Office. That’s $500×3… $1500 in total.
- A school is not allowed to do a mural of Curious George, as he is under copyright.
While what the quiz teaches is in fact true, is this what you want kids to walk away with? Is it wise to highlight that doing drawings of “Curious George” being an act worthy of lawsuits with settlements in the tens of thousands of dollars? That a family should pay three times over for a wordprocessing application?
In any instance, these should be the adult’s problems; not that of the children. Copyright has always been about protecting the authors from pirated competition of their own work. Where does that belong in a children’s world? Yes, they should be taught that plagiarism is bad, and that one can’t make money off of copyrighted works – but that should be it. The site is ambiguous enough that a child feeding upon its information could easily assume that using any copyrighted work without permission is wrong.
That means that a child visiting the site will assume that making drawings of Spiderman is ILLEGAL. And that the child could face stiff penalties for drawing his favourite X-Men.
I can’t help but feel that this is a campaign not to educate on copyright, but rather to push through the whole anti-downloading message by the BSA. That would at least explain the emphasis in the quiz questions on EULAs – and using EULAs to determine what’s allowed and not allowed with software. Though EULAs express the copyright owners will under copyright, it is itself not copyright. And therefore, one has to question why its discussed so thoroughly on a site that pretends to educated on copyright laws.
The complete lack of discussion on fair use is also contrary to any decent education on copyrights, esp. in a context of education. That is another factor which leads me to believe that this is the effort not of a party concerned with educating copyright, but more of one concerned with pushing forth a certain narrow-minded agenda.
PS. According to the Quiz’ website, I could be in legal danger for having put a hyperlink to them:
Permission is expressly granted to any person who wishes to place a link in his or her own website to www.accesscopyright.ca or any of its pages with the following exception: in order to protect the moral rights associated with this site, permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of Access Copyright.
Let it be known that I reject the legitimacy of their claims upon hyperlinking. I also reject its claim that I’m not allowed to reproduce the above exceprt, as per the following statement on their website:
iv. You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windowsâ„¢ clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website.
Both these outlandish claims are available from:
http://www.captaincopyright.ca/Ipnotice.aspx