Michael Geist

Latest Posts

CETA Update: Copyright Deal Has Been Reached, Patents To Go To the Ministers

Canada’s chief Canada – EU Trade Agreement negotiators provided an update on the CETA talks today, sketching out an ambitious negotiation schedule that they hope will lead to a Ministerial meeting in November to resolve the key outstanding issues. The next round of CETA negotiations will occur in Brussels in […]

October 5, 2012 — 5 comments — News

Information Commissioner Launches Consultation on Access to Information

The Information Commissioner of Canada has launched a public consultation on access-to-information legislation. The consultation, which is open until December 21, 2012, invites comments on a wide range of issues including right of access, coverage of the Act, limitations, and cabinet confidences.

October 3, 2012 — Comments are Disabled — News

Privacy Commissioner Should Disclose the Identities of Privacy â€œLeakersâ€

Last week, Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart released the results of a disturbing new study conducted by her office that found many leading websites “leaking” personal information. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the study, which came on the heels of similar findings by researchers in the United States, found that one in every four websites examined suffered from privacy leaks that included disclosing names, email addresses, postal codes, and location data to third party advertisers (in the interests of full disclosure, I am a member of the Stoddart’s external advisory board).

The study only covered 25 of the most popular e-commerce and media websites in Canada, suggesting that many more organizations may be violating Canadian privacy law by failing to adequately safeguard the personal information they collect and providing users with insufficient information about how their data is used and disclosed.

October 3, 2012 — 8 comments — Columns

Posner on Copyright: Restrictive Fair Use a Risk To Creativity

Judge Richard Posner, one of the best regarded judges in the world, has a blog post in which he expresses concern about the potential for patent and copyright law to restrict competition and creativity. On patents, Posner notes:

When patent protection provides an inventor with more insulation from competition than he needed to have an adequate incentive to make the invention, the result is to increase market prices above efficient levels, causing distortions in the allocation of resources

He continues by citing the software industry as an example of the dangers of excessive patent protection. On copyright, he expresses doubt about the social benefit of copyright for any academic work other than textbooks, noting that they are a by-product of academic research that would be produced with or without copyright protection. His two major concerns involve the term of copyright (which is longer in the U.S. than in Canada but could be extended under the TPP) and narrow interpretations of fair use:

October 2, 2012 — 22 comments — News

Educational Fair Dealing Policy Shows Why the Access Copyright Licence Provides Little Value

Last month, I reported that Association of Canadian Community Colleges had received a legal opinion concluding that the Access Copyright model licence had “little value” for educational institutions. The opinion recommended that ACCC members not sign the Access Copyright model licence and that those operating under the Access Copyright interim tariff cease to do so. While it did not receive much attention, the same counsel also provided a model fair dealing policy. The policy does an effective job of demonstrating why the Access Copyright licence provides very little value to education as fair dealing covers much of what the copyright collective currently offers educational users.

The core elements of the model fair dealing policy include the following:

1. Teachers, instructors, professors and staff members in non-profit educational institutions may communicate and reproduce, in paper or electronic form, short excerpts from a copyright-protected work for the purposes of research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire and parody.

2. Copying or communicating short excerpts from a copyright-protected work under this Fair Dealing Policy for the purpose of news reporting, criticism or review should mention the source and, if given in the source, the name of the author or creator of the work.

3. A single copy of a short excerpt from a copyright-protected work may be provided or communicated to each student enrolled in a class or course:
a. as a class handout
b. as a posting to a learning or course management system that is password â€¨protected or otherwise restricted to students of a school or post-secondary â€¨educational institution
c. as part of a course pack

4. A short excerpt means:
a. up to 10% of a copyright-protected work (including a literary work, musical score, sound recording, and an audiovisual work)
b. one chapter from a book
c. a single article from a periodical
d. an entire artistic work (including a painting, print, photograph, diagram, drawing, map, chart, and plan) from a copyright-protected work containing other artistic works
e. an entire newspaper article or page
f. an entire single poem or musical score from a copyright-protected work â€¨containing other poems or musical scores
g. an entire entry from an encyclopedia, annotated bibliography, dictionary or â€¨similar reference work