Canadian Arts Content Management System and Centre for Digital Policy and Cultural Rights Initiatives

New Media Collaboration Centre: Canadian Arts Content Management System and Centre for Digital Policy and Cultural Rights Initiatives

The second development phase of Artmob, currently in progress, is funded through a CFI submitted with Dr. Christopher Innes and his www.ModernDrama.ca project.

"A Canadian legal and cultural perspective has guided the direction of the proposed project from its conception. It takes into account the specific concerns of Canadian users and rights holders working with digital media objects. While there are certainly other Canadian open source development projects, none address the specificities of the Canadian legal and cultural environment. Currently there is no other CMS development project, open source or otherwise, working with Canadian arts groups at this level of technical sophistication; the proposed research is unique in its reflection of their concerns and offers the benefit of making resources and opportunities available to Canadian arts and cultural groups that are normally outside their reach.

"Public licensing regimes imported from the United States need to be modified for Canadian needs (particularly those relevant to moral rights). The CMS will enable these needs to be documented, and new public licensing provisions to be created and tested. Without a fair use exemption, Canadians face the limits of a fair dealing defence without a robust jurisprudence. New forms of digital technology enable the conditions of fair dealing to be built into the architecture of archives, but there has been little effort to actualize these possibilities. Canadian law reform is accelerating rapidly with insufficient public input to inform the direction of policy development. This digital infrastructure is being created in a manner that will facilitate the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data that will assist Canadian and international scholars and policymakers in addressing the technological, pedagogical, social, cultural and legal questions that publishing arts material in a publicly licensed open-source environment poses.

"The proposed activities are not only innovative in terms of their technical sophistication and the placement of that technology in the hands of cash-strapped arts groups and researchers, but also in terms of the quality and nature of the content we propose to present. We have established partnerships with a core set of groups and individuals with a track record of leadership and innovation in the Canadian arts and culture sector. All of these groups are interested in the establishment of large archives of full-length rich media content online; many have already begun this process. Moreover, all are interested in keeping their digital archives as open as possible, without the restriction of unwieldy and ineffective software-based content locking systems that ultimately inhibit use of their content rather than encouraging it. By integrating public licensing systems such as the Creative Commons licenses directly into every aspect of our software infrastructure, we are laying the groundwork for the emergence of a culture of fair dealing for online Canadian content, creating a set of best practices for those interested in following suit, and making available the tools to do so at little or no cost."

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