The British Library and Google have reached an agreement to digitize 250,000 public domain books that will be made freely available online.
Latest Posts
CRTC Vertical Integration Hearing Opens Today: Too Little, Too Late?
The key to ensuring a competitive environment therefore rests on maintaining open platforms on all service providers. That may prove challenging, since the newly vertically-integrated companies will find it tempting to grant preferential treatment to their own assets. In addition to exclusivity, this could take the form of faster speeds on wireless services for company-controlled broadcasts, allowing users quicker access to the walled garden content.
Alternatively, it might mean excluding walled garden content from the bandwidth caps imposed by most providers. Under such a scenario, subscribers would find that accessing walled garden content would be “free” in the sense that it would not count against their monthly bandwidth allocation. By contrast, competing Internet services would effectively face an additional cost, since subscribers would have to factor in their bandwidth consumption.
These scenarios point to the possibility of greater regulatory intervention to ensure a fully competitive converged broadcast and telecom environment. Indeed, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission expressed concern about this direction in its 2009 New Media decision.
Notwithstanding assurances from the wireless carriers that walled gardens have not proven successful and “the industry is quickly moving toward the open Internet model, whereby mobile users can access content of their choice,” the commission worried that “the ownership structure within Canada’s wireless industry suggests that the potential for unduly preferential treatment needs to be addressed because the industry structure comprises vertically integrated companies with ownership interests in content providers.”
Get Yer Grimy Paws Off My Netflix
David Ellis has a must-read two part series (part one, two) on Netflix, the CRTC, and the efforts of some groups to regulate over-the-top video.
Access Copyright’s Desperation: From Fair Dealing Allows Everything to It’s Too Risky to Rely Upon
Access Copyright’s response has grown increasingly desperate. First it stopped offering transactional licences to educational institutions in the hope that those institutions would opt for the more expensive comprehensive licences instead. When the practice was publicly exposed, Access Copyright offered a laughable response that transactional licensing creates incentives to infringe. The Canadian educational institutions have filed a complaint with the Copyright Board in a case that will unfold over the summer.
Since the transactional licence gambit is likely to fail, Access Copyright has now released a note designed to scare the institutions away from relying on fair dealing. After months of issuing dire warnings that fair dealing would allow educational institutions to copy virtually everything without limits or compensation during the Bill C-32 debate (including claims that all educational licences were at risk), Access Copyright now ironically argues the opposite – that fair dealing is legally risky and should not be relied upon by educational institutions.
Andreas Schroeder on Counting the Pennies
Andreas Schroeder, one of the creators of the Public Lending Right, comments on how copyright collectives need to carefully examine the cost and benefits of some of its initiatives that yield little economic return.
Recent Posts
The Sound of Silence: On Being Jewish in Canada in 2025 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 241: Scott Benzie on How Government Policy Has Eroded Big Tech Support for Canadian Culture 
What Is the Canadian Government Doing With Its Incoherent Approach to TikTok? 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 240: Dean Beeby on Why Canada’s Language Laws May Stop Government From Posting Access to Information Records Online 
Risky Business: The Legal and Privacy Concerns of Mandatory Age Verification Technologies
