Copyright control and open access: From Queen Anne past Bill 60

This presentation will investigate the following myths and their relevance to learning institutions and the open access movement. 1. Copyright was instituted to protect the rights of the copyright owner. 2. Copyrighted materials are intellectual “property” 3. Copying copyrighted material is “stealing”. 4. Sharing your copyrighted materials is “giving away” something. 5. Pirating hurts the authors of copyrighted material 6. The Big companies controlling copyright help the artists. 7. Copyright does not support the public domain. 8. “Fair use” or “fair dealing” is an exception to copyright law 9. Copyright controllers are not trying to entrench their monopoly. 10. Without copyright no one will produce creative works. 11. Strict copyright laws benefit consumers. 12. Strengthening Copyright protection enables innovation and creativity

Rory McGreal, Associate VP Research, Athabasca University Rory McGreal is Associate Vice President, Research at Athabasca University – Canada’s Open University. Previously, he was the executive director of TeleEducation New Brunswick, a province-wide bilingual (French/English) distributed distance learning network. Before that, he was responsible for the expansion of Contact North (a distance education network in Northern Ontario) into the high schools of the region. His present interest in mobile learning research grows from his investigations into learning objects and standardization for interoperability among different applications and devices. He is leading efforts at AU to build an open access learning object repository that will facilitate data output to a wide variety of mobile devices.