Copyright Wars

Canada seems to be fighting back against the government-sponsored, corporate-driven copyright digital copyright rules that already exist in the United States. This short video explains the issue to Canadians in a brilliant 5-minute mash-up of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and a compilation of science fiction movie and television standards by Galacticast.



As the recording industry sinks deeper and deeper into the DMCA quaqmire by now claiming that U.S. citizens cannot rip CD content onto your computer from legally purchased CDs, it seems clear that the downside of being an information economy is the push to lay legal claim to all sorts of information for the purpose of exacting a price for the use of that information. From a learning perspective this scares me to the bones.

Despite the best claims of businesses that their subject matter experts have all of the data necessary to develop the training they are buying, as an instructional designer who is often required to fast-track training development in the name of rapid instructional design, I and others like me often turn to the Internet to fill in gaps because the SME is not available and time constraints require us to produce content.

As information becomes more proprietary we run into another time hurdle in which we have to survey the site to determine if the information posted there is available for public consumption or is proprietary.