Appeared in the Toronto Star on April 19, 2014 as Trademark Overhaul Promises to Please No One It started innocuously enough with the House of Commons Committee on Industry, Science and Technology releasing its long-awaited report on intellectual property in Canada in March 2013. The report included a recommendation that […]
Archive for April, 2014
Why the Government’s New Digital Privacy Act Puts Your Privacy at Risk
Appeared in the Toronto Star on April 12, 2014 as Why the Government’s New Digital Privacy Act Puts Your Privacy at Risk After years of false starts, Industry Minister James Moore last week unveiled the Digital Privacy Act, the long-awaited reform package of Canada’s private sector privacy law. While the […]
Access Copyright Urges Copyright Board to Ignore Bill C-11’s Expansion of Fair Dealing
As I noted in a post yesterday, Access Copyright has filed its response to the Copyright Board of Canada’s series of questions about fair dealing and education in the tariff proceedings involving Canadian post-secondary institutions. Yesterday’s post focused on how Access Copyright has urged the Copyright Board to ignore the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the relevance of licences to a fair dealing analysis. Today’s post examines the collective’s response to the Copyright Board’s question on the effect of the fair dealing legislative change in Bill C-32/C-11. Access Copyright engages in revisionist history as it seeks to hide its extensive lobbying campaign that warned that the reforms would permit mass copying without compensation.
For two years during the debates over the bill, Access Copyright stood as the most vocal opponent of the expansion of the fair dealing purposes to include education. Given its frequent public comments and lobbying efforts on the bill, one would think its response to the Copyright Board, would be pretty straight-forward. For example, it created a copyright reform website – CopyrightGetitRight.ca – that warned:
the education exception will permit mass, industrial-scale copying (equivalent to millions of books every year) without compensation to the creators and publishers who invested their creativity, skill, money and effort to produce this content.
Access Copyright Urges Copyright Board to Ignore Supreme Court Ruling on Fair Dealing
Access Copyright has filed its response to the Copyright Board of Canada’s series of questions about fair dealing and education in the tariff proceedings involving Canadian post-secondary institutions. I have several posts planned about the 40 page response, which continues the copyright collective’s longstanding battle against fair dealing. This one focuses on Access Copyright’s astonishing effort to urge the Copyright Board to reject the Supreme Court of Canada’s clear ruling on the relevance of licensing within the context of fair dealing.
Access Copyright has frequently argued that the availability of a licence should trump fair dealing. For example, in the 2001 copyright consultation it stated:
As a rule, where collective licensing is in place there should be no exception or limitation to a right for which the holder has a legitimate interest. As defined in the Act, anytime that a licence to reproduce a work is available from a collective society within a reasonable time, for a reasonable price and with reasonable effort, it is commercially available.
Access Copyright reiterated its position in its 2003 intervention in the Law Society of Upper Canada v. CCH Canadian case. It argued:
The Expansion of Warrantless Disclosure Under S-4: Government’s Response Fails to Reassure
My post and column on the expansion of warrantless disclosure under Bill S-4, the misleadingly named Digital Privacy Act, has attracted some attention and a response from Industry Canada. The department told iPolitics:
“Companies who share personal information are required to comply with the rules to ensure that information is only disclosed for the purpose of conducting an investigation into a contravention of a law or breach of an agreement. For example, self-regulating professional associations, such as a provincial law society, may wish to investigate allegations of malpractice made by a client. When organizations are sharing private information, the Privacy Commissioner can investigate violations and may take legal action against companies who do not follow the rules. This is consistent with privacy laws in British Columbia and Alberta and was recommended by the Standing Committee Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.”
The response may sound reassuring, but it shouldn’t be.
Recent Posts
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 200: Colin Bennett on the EU’s Surprising Adequacy Finding on Canadian Privacy Law 
Debating the Online Harms Act: Insights from Two Recent Panels on Bill C-63 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 199: Boris Bytensky on the Criminal Code Reforms in the Online Harms Act 
AI Spending is Not an AI Strategy: Why the Government’s Artificial Intelligence Plan Avoids the Hard Governance Questions 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 198: Richard Moon on the Return of the Section 13 Hate Speech Provision in the Online Harms Act
