Ever send your distance students a link to a website?
Michael Geist has an interesting legal piece in the Toronto Star entitled Will copyright reform chill use of Web?. In it, he discusses a recent parliamentary committee report (44 page PDF) on copyright reform that, if adopted, would mean that Canadian educational institutions would be required to seek permission to use anything available on the web that didn’t explicitely state it could be used w/o prior permission. The juicy stuff is in the second half of his article. I note that the parliamentary committee report does have a note that it can be reproduced…
This reminds me of a post I read on Alan Levine’s cogdogblog the other day in which he described how he has some photos on the web, and how some folks ask his permission to use them, and how he almost always says “sure”. But not long ago someone (from Canada, hmmmmm) asked permission and asked that Alan send his permission in writing (a burden for him), and that what he sent was actually returned to him for insufficient postage!
I dunno, both of these scenerios seem pretty silly in this digital age.