CBC’s new licencing plan: Pay to Print, Email, and Blog, and outsource enforcement . . .

[Posteritatis]

. . . to American Copyright Digital Rights Bounty Hunters


(Sorry, whole headline wouldn't fit in the subject)

Today, we have this wonderful gem:

Yesterday, Jesse Brown and Michael Geist briefly tweeted about CBC’s new licencing plan. I checked it out, and thought: well, if the government is going to continue to slash budgets, CBC needs to try to get revenue somehow. However, Rupert Murdoch..I mean.. Bono.. I mean Richard Stursberg has gone a bit far by using an American company, iCopyright (Copyright operates out of Issaquah, Washington), to outsource its licencing. It doesn’t follow Canadian copyright rules, and it doesn’t seem to act in the best interests of a public broadcaster. This is only the tip of the iceberg though.

Let’s look through how one licences an article and how much it costs:

The article's worth poking through at length to see the depth of this absurdity. The short version is if I want to link to a random CBC article - Whoops, sorry, my finger slipped there - I would have to pay five hundred bucks a year per article to do so or else some American company would come up and I don't know what. So yeah, this post cost me $2500. Maybe $3000 if the Khadr article screenshot in the blog post counts. What a wonderful revenue generating mechanism they've found!

Considering Canadians pay CBC staff's wages and costs in the first place, this strikes me as somewhere between fascinatingly weird and headexplodingly infuriating.

Fuckez-vous, iCopyright.

[Metric System]

1. Seriously?!? Wow, this is completely insane. I'm still shaking my head.

[daleo]

2. I can't see it being legal

It would turn fair use in its head.