Australia Copyright Agency to schools: pay Internet licenses or shut down the net!

via BoingBoing

Australian schools may have to pay a copyright fee every time a student is told to look at the web, if a plan from the national collecting society is successful.

There are a number of good reasons why Australian schools should not pay:

• 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?)
• the vast majority of pages online weren't created by Australians
• he vast majority of pages created by Australians weren't created by professional authors

If this proposal is accepted, we are giving the "clever" in clever country away and will really depend on the "luck" in our lucky country.

Goodness me. Education IS for the next generation. We need to tax organisation or people suggesting such a proposal to fund the education system.