Draft WIPO Treaty: Copyright Exceptions and Limitations for Educational and Research Activities

[Cable Green]

Greetings Open Education Colleagues:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is considering whether they will take action to encourage countries to have stronger limitations and exceptions to copyright.  In this debate, it's valuable to hear from the open education community.  For OER in particular, clear standards about copyright exceptions for education will enhance access to learning resources and will simplify questions about including and sharing third party material in OER.

Civil society groups have written a draft treaty, and are asking for groups to sign in support.  Sign-ons in October will be valuable in preparation for the November WIPO meeting.  

The core of the draft treaty requires that all copyright laws contain rights to use materials for educational or research purposes compatible with fair practice, including:

• making copies in the course of teaching, learning, and research
  
• performing or communicating works in an educational context
  
• making quotations
  
• using images, short works and excerpts of longer works
  
• translating materials
  
• using materials for which the right holder cannot reasonably be identified or located, or for which there is no longer a commercial exploitation
  
• making and providing accessible format copies of materials to people with disabilities
  
• importing lawfully made copies of materials
  
• to use works for computational or other research uses that do not themselves express or communicate the work to the public, including indexing and text and data-mining

Creative Commons is planning to endorse this draft treaty. The treaty aims are aligned with our organisational vision, and with our strategy that includes advocacy and copyright reform to improve equitable access to education and research resources. 

We encourage your organisations to review the draft treaty and considering signing on too.

Documents:

• summary of the draft treaty
• full text of the draft treaty 
• sign-on form

With gratitude,

Cable

Cable Green, PhD
Director of Open Education
Creative Commons

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(this e-mail is a remix from posts by Meredith Jacob, Tim Vollmer and Sean Flynn)

[Cable Green]

Good questions, Pen.

Looping in Sean and Meredith.

Cable

On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 1:42 AM Pen Lister <penw...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all

At risk of potentially provoking argument, I do see potential problems with some of the bullet points above. 

For example:

• making copies in the course of teaching, learning, and research  - this should ideally have some kind of limitation on fully copyright works. In a digital context, permitting a limitless amount of copying in the name of education is just an open license to copy and distribute works. This in essence is why Sci Hub exists.
  
  
• to use works for computational or other research uses that do not themselves express or communicate the work to the public, including indexing and text and data-mining - this is potentially rather dangerous ground, is it not? Data mining of large data sets or data gathering for 'computational' purposes infringes privacy on a mass scale. 
  

Also, can some please clarify 'importing lawfully made copies of materials' - Does it mean importing, as in across copyright territories, or what?

Im now reading the full doc!

Pen

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penworks.net | @penworks | skype:penworkz

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