Captain Copyright reappears in Colombia

Friday 28 March 2008 12:38 COT

This article has been cross-posted from iCommons

This is the story of the tropical reinvention of "Captain Copyright", a cartoon superhero who was suppose to devoted his life to teaching children the virtues of copyright. The brainchild of a Canadian government campaign that appeared in the end of 2006, "Captain Copyright" was usually portrayed flying on the scene in which someone published research without proper credit. In the website dedicated to Captain Copyright, the campaign offered educational resources to be integrated into the classroom’s of Canadian school children.

The classroom exercises that Captain Copyright taught young children generally reinforced the limits that copyright imposes on the conduct of people and failed to address other aspects of copyright, such as exceptions in favour of everyone in society, the public domain, the ability to share, and so on. At that time, commentators like Professor Geist pointed out: "there is no reference to user rights, which are particularly relevant in the education context." He concluded: "Our children need to develop love for learning, a passion for creativity, and appreciation of art and science. The exercises that are offered do not provide any of that. Instead they reduce Canadian copyright to levels not seen before. They are so shameful that they should not be included in any classroom in the country." The campaign had to be ended, months later in 2007.

Recently, the Colombian National Planning Department (DNP) will submit for approval to the National Council for Social and Economic Politics (CONPES) a document on intellectual property that takes upon Captain Copyright’s idea of protection and enforcement of copyright. As it happened in the case of Captain Copyright’s materials, this document emphasis the possibilities of developing Colombian competitiveness and development only on the limits side of the equation, without watching all the other issues that influence the maintenance of a balanced system of creativity.

A comprehensive reading of the document suggests that the Colombian state is focusing its efforts and resources into developing our own version of "Captain Copyright" that will give educational recommendations for children, academics and public officials and will likely produce a "surveillance" state system.

The document’s main argument is that our country’s development regarding intellectual property issues, rely on grounds of "protection and enforcement". Such a conclusion is based mainly in the fact that the revenue for intellectual property related industries is higher in developed countries than in ours. The document has absolutely no references or background research, achievements and implications of recent approaches such as Free Software, Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Business, etc.

Furthermore the document analysis ignores completely important changes in the intellectual property sector evident over the last few years, which are not necessarily legal tools for increasing copyright control, but rather the appearance of legal alternatives to empower authors’ decision on how to manage their rights. Today, authors can exploit new environments for business or can simply decide to share knowledge using technology. In other words, for example, is it justified that Colombian public policies remain focusing on university professors who produce printed knowledge and want to protect their production incentives? Or is it time to start considering also the digital production that follows from different formats that are equally valuable and legal?

Despite the fact that this document is not public yet, only a few people were invited to discuss it in the last weeks, an Internet campaign already seeks attention to the matter since CONPES will be soon deciding the approval of such public policy. We are focusing our efforts in requesting the CONPES to: (1) involve government institutions related to education and culture to point out their special needs and legal regimes in this issue, (2) to involve civil society actors interested in this topic, and (3) to immediately start drafting another document that will address the other side of the copyright regime; if despite of its limitations, the current document is still approved.

If you want to sign and support go to firmasonline.com

[Updated at 18:45 COT]

Tags: Colombia, Colombian politics, CONPES, copyleft, copyright, Creative Commons, DNP, free software, iCommons, intellectual property, open access, open business, open educational resources, policy law, public domain, public policy