As the battle over Canada's private copying levy intensifies – London Drugs and the Retail Council Canada are following up on yesterday's Best Buy op-ed by urging customers to write to the government – the United Kingdom has just provided Industry Minister Jim Prentice with a terrific example of how […]
Post Tagged with: "parody"
Why Canada Needs More Flexible Fair Dealing
Several people have pointed to the excellent new report from the Center for Social Media on quoting copyrighted material in user-generated video. The report provides another illustration of why Canada needs more flexible fair dealing since some of the fair uses would not be applicable here. In other words, Canadians […]
The Making of Canada’s Copyright Bill
Great parody of the making of the forthcoming copyright bill that rings a bit too close to reality.
The New C-47 Provisions
As I blogged earlier this week, the Industry Committee made some noteworthy changes to the Olympic Marks bill. While the posting focused on the inclusion of protection for parody and electronic media, the revised bill also includes a new provision to protect artistic work that is not produced on a commercial scale. The two new provisions are:
Olympic Marks Bill Amended to Protect Bloggers and Parody
The Industry Committee completed its short review of Bill C-47 this morning by approving several amendments to the bill. These notably include amending the exceptions provision (which previously only referred to the use of the Olympic marks for criticism or in the publication or broadcast of a news report) in two important ways. First, parody was added to the list, so that the use of the Olympic marks for parody purposes falls outside the Act. Second, the bill now specifically refers to electronic media as enjoying the same exception as other forms of media.
The importance of these amendments could extend far beyond this particular bill. In the case of the parody exception, it arguably highlights a clear shortcoming in current Canadian law (parody is missing from the Copyright Act as well) – one that ought to be addressed in any future intellectual property reform package. Moreover, providing specific protection for electronic media in this bill may open the door to similar media equality in other legal areas.
While the Committee added several other amendments (including a sunset clause for Schedule 3, which contains many generic words), the other notable occurrence was the submission of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, a leading Canadian IP organization, and its Past-President Cynthia Rowden. IPIC did the profession proud – as the only neutral, non-governmental witness to appear before the committee, it rightly criticized the bill for providing exceptional rights to one specific group.