Captain Copyright was a

propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...

cartoon character created by

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

Access Copyright Access © or Access Copyright is the operating name of a Canada Business Corporations Act corporation whose official registration name is The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (formerly Cancopy). It is a not-for-profit copyright collective that c ...

agency in 2006 to educate children about the agency's stance on

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

and

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

. 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)". As of January 11, 2013, the website redirects to

's main site.

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

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

, but fails to follow the requirements of English Wikipedia's GNU FDL license by providing a direct link back to the source article or even acknowledging the GNU license as required by English Wikipedia. On further investigation, several more English Wikipedia quotes were also found on the site; however, as of 5 June 2006, all the English 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".The strange saga of Captain Copyright
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 (or spaceshifting), also known as place shifting (or placeshifting), allows media, such as music or films, which are stored on one device, to be accessed from another place through another device. Space shifting is frequently done thr ...

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 The Copyright Board of Canada (french: Commission du droit d'auteur du 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 w ...

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 The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

documents, which are intended to be

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...

ed to by the structure of

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

itself — are intended to stifle

fair dealing Fair dealing is a limitation and exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. Fair dealing is found in many of the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth of Nations. Fair dealing is an en ...

, debate on copyright issues, and legitimate criticism of Access Copyright's approach despite Captain Copyright being pitched as a tool for education.Canadian copyright agency launches kids' propaganda campaign

References

External links

*{{cite web , url=http://www.captaincopyright.ca , title=Captain Copyright , accessdate=2006-06-02 , url-status=dead , archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20060612221835/http://www.captaincopyright.ca/ , archivedate=2006-06-12

Official Site
Copyright campaigns Canadian copyright law Propaganda cartoons Male superheroes Internet properties established in 2006 Internet properties disestablished in 2006 Fictional characters introduced in 2006