The Canadian government has table its copyright bill, bill C-60. Michael Geist has written a short introduction to the bill, and promises more analysis in the days to come. According to Geist, Canada, not to be outdone by copyright laws in other countries, has pandered to big business leaving individual Canadians with fewer rights. However, I think there are some positive developments for Interlibrary loans and distance education. Specifically, the bill states that interlibrary loan articles can be sent digitally to users:
Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply with respect to the making of a copy in digital form of printed matter and its provision to a person who has requested the copy through another library, archive or museum unless the library, archive, museum or person providing the copy takes measures that can reasonably be expected to prevent the making of any reproduction of the copy other than a single printing, its communication, or its use for a period of more than seven days.
June 28th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
That’s not positive at all. There currently exists no technology that can enforce the 7 day rule. It’s like they’ll have to invent a DivX style self-destruct mechanism, and the libraries are surely not going to pay for the R&D on that. This will just cause them to totally abandon their e-book program altogether, most likely.
June 29th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
yeah… i know… i realized that afterwards… i’ll be posting something from Michael Geist’s blog that talks about this. Thanks for pointing it out though.
June 29th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
[…] e when I read the portion of the Act that talks about interlibrary loan… A couple of posts ago I showed some optimism at the […]