This has implications for New Zealand schools:

Copyright makes web a turn off

It seems that the Australian copyright people want to collect a fee from schools to cover printing from web pages.

As Cory Doctorow puts it (he is more eloquesnt than I am):

Now they say that they deserve to collect for the use of the Web. Despite the fact that there’s an implied license to read Web pages that goes along with publishing them (who puts up a web-page without expecting it to be read?) and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages online weren’t created by Australians, and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages created by Australians weren’t created by professional authors, the agency proposes that it should be able to collect a tax on behalf of all those authors in the world in order to line the pockets of its few lucky members.

Australian educators are saying that if they are going to be charged they are going to have to turn off their internet connections because the cost will be too high:

“If it turned out we’d have to pay them, we’d turn the internet off in schools,” the council’s national copyright director Delia Browne said.

“We couldn’t afford it; it would not be sustainable. How on earth are we going to deliver education in the 21st century? How are taxpayers going to afford this.”

I need to do some research.