The mainstream media coverage of copyright continues – the Montreal Gazette features a "bluffer's guide" to copyright, the Toronto Star reports on how "the copyfight is underway in earnest in Canada," and the Ottawa Citizen covers next month's private copying levy court hearing and the 2003 battle over the Lucy Maud Montgomery Copyright Term Extension Act.
More MSM Copyright Coverage
Tags: cdmca / Copyright Canada / copyright for canadians / Copyright Microsite - Canadian Copyright / dmca / prentice / private copying
4 Comments
Recent Posts
Time for the Government to Fix Its Political Party Privacy Blunder: Kill Bill C-4’s Disastrous Privacy Rules 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 257: Lisa Given on What Canada Can Learn From Australia’s Youth Social Media Ban 
Court Ordered Social Media Site Blocking Coming to Canada?: Trojan Horse Online Harms Bill Clears Senate Committee Review 
An Illusion of Consensus: What the Government Isn’t Saying About the Results of its AI Consultation 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 256: Jennifer Quaid on Taking On Big Tech With the Competition Act’s Private Right of Access
Letters to the editor
Any time we see mainstream media coverage on an issue, we should write a letter to the editor. I just wrote one to the Gazette 🙂
Levy
My question is about this:
“The recording industry association opposes the iPod levy because of its concern that by paying the $75, consumers would believe they therefore had the legal right to download music and shift those files among different formats.”
I wonder, how could a consumer interpret this as anything other then a license to copy? You can’t be hit with a fine with out committing some sort of crime, and I thought there was a legal principle that you can’t be forced to
Levy (continued)
(Sorry, I bumped the submit button before I was done)
… pay, but not receive compensation. The argument for the levy seems to be a presumption of guilt with out any evidence. It seems only fair that you should be able to make copies of your media, if you’ve been judged guilty just by making a purchase.
Thank you for your interesting blog and all your work.
-Steve
About five years ago, Sheila Copps (then the Heritage Minister) was giving a talk to university student journalists, and one of them asked her basically that same question: Does paying the fee give you a license to copy?
Surprisingly (though it may have been Copps’s unfamiliarity with the issue) she said that indeed it did. Student newspapers ran with the story, saying the government condones downloading music (at least for personal use)