Captain Copyright
Encyclopedia
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
cartoon character created by Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
's Access Copyright
Access Copyright
Access © or Access Copyright is the operating name of a Canadian business corporation whose official registration name is The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency...
agency to educate children about the agency's stance on copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
and copyright infringement
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
. As of August 18, 2006, the Captain Copyright initiative had been canceled.
As of March 3, 2007, the website has a three-paragraph statement explaining that "we have come to the conclusion that the current climate around copyright issues will not allow a project like this one to be successful".
As of March 14, 2008, the website gives a 400 Bad Request, stating "Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)".
Controversy
Not long after the launch of a website introducing the character, concerns were raised in a number of quarters that the character was not appropriate for educational uses, as it was produced by an entity with a commercial interest in the state of copyright law in Canada, and it is unclear that it is following copyright law itself.For example, it was reported that the Captain Copyright web page used two quotes about ISBNs from Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, but fails to follow the requirements of Wikipedia's GNU FDL license by providing a direct link back to the source article or even acknowledging the GNU license as required by Wikipedia. On further investigation, several more Wikipedia quotes were also found on the site; however, as of 5 June 2006, all the Wikipedia quotes were removed, and Suzanne Dugard, manager of communications for Access Copyright, stated in an interview with canada.com that their inclusion had been "just an oversight".
It has also been noted that the site avoids the issue of the blank media levy in Canada when discussing the legalities of space shifting
Space shifting
Space shifting , also known as place shifting , allows media, such as music or films, which is stored on one device to be accessed from another place through another device. Space shifting is frequently done through computer networks, for example by viewing a television broadcast from a WiFi...
and downloading copyrighted material without permission. While it is illegal to make such material available for download, as of 2006 the Copyright Board of Canada
Copyright Board of Canada
The Copyright Board of Canada is an economic regulatory body empowered to establish, either mandatorily or at the request of an interested party, the royalties to be paid for the use of copyrighted works, when the administration of such copyright is entrusted to a collective-administration society...
has indicated that it is not illegal to download copyrighted material once it has been made available illegally, a ruling made specifically because of the earlier imposition of the levy. For example, a teacher's handout claims that for music "the copyright is for the recording on the media device, not the words or music on it," even though the intent of the blank media levy is to compensate copyright holders in return for allowing the shifting of the copyrighted material from media to media.
Others have pointed out that Access Copyright has placed the following two statements on the Captain Copyright website:
In both cases, it has been questioned whether or not these clauses — unusual for HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
documents, which are intended to be hyperlinked
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
to by the structure of web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
itself — are intended to stifle fair dealing
Fair dealing
Fair dealing is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work, which is found in many of the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth of Nations....
, debate on copyright issues, and legitimate criticism of Access Copyright's approach despite Captain Copyright being pitched as a tool for education.
Parody
The one-sided approach to copyright promoted by the Captain Copyright campaign has been ridiculed and parodied by fair use advocates. For example, The Continuing Adventures of Private Infringer was a short-lived fan fictionFan fiction
Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...
blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
whose title character's every action was prevented by Captain Copyright. Google Blogoscoped
Google Blogoscoped
Google Blogoscoped is a blog authored by Philipp Lenssen covering the search engine company Google since 2003.Blogoscoped reports mainly on product releases but also offers tips and tutorials and tracks any projects of the Mountain View, California company...
also posted a parody.