The government’s Internet regulation plans were back on the agenda last week as a “what we heard report” was released on online harms and Bill C-11 – the sequel to last year’s controversial Bill C-10 – was introduced by Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez. The Law Bytes podcast will devote several episodes to the bill in the coming months. For this week, however, rather than inviting a guest to discuss a bill that people are still assessing, I appear solo and walk through the bill’s provisions involving user generated content. The podcast also highlights several ongoing concerns involving the near-unlimited jurisdictional scope of the bill, the considerable uncertainty for all stakeholders, the misplaced trust in the CRTC, and the weak evidentiary case for the bill.
Search Results for "c-11" : 411
Not Ready for Prime Time: Why Bill C-11 Leaves the Door Open to CRTC Regulation of User Generated Content
Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez introduced the much-anticipated sequel to Bill C-10 yesterday. The minister and his department insisted that the new Bill C-11 addressed the concerns raised with Bill C-10 and that Canadians could be assured that regulating user generated content is off the table. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t the case. The new bill, now billed the Online Streaming Act, restores one exception but adds a new one, leaving the door open for CRTC regulation. Indeed, for all the talk that user generated content is out, the truth is that everything from podcasts to TikTok videos fit neatly into the new exception that gives the CRTC the power to regulate such content as a “program”.
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.
Canadian Broadcasters Seek Overhaul of Radio Copyright Fees Post-C-11 & Fair Dealing Decisions
The Canadian Association of Broadcasters has applied to the Copyright Board of Canada for a radical overhaul of the current fees paid by radio stations for commercial radio reproduction of music. The CAB argues that in light of copyright reforms in Bill C-11 and the Supreme Court of Canada’s rulings on fair dealing, there is no legal basis for several tariffs proposed by CMRRA-SODRAC (CSI), AVLA, and ACTRA and that the rate on earlier approved tariffs should be significantly reduced.
The CAB position on the impact of the law is that:
The result of the changes to the Copyright Act made by the Copyright Modernization Act, when combined with the fair dealing right as applied in ESA, is to eliminate or significantly reduce the liability of radio broadcasters for the reproductions made by them in the course of their broadcasting activities. Even the reproduction collectives agree that the legislative changes alone will eliminate most liability of radio broadcasters for reproductions of music.
Government To Delay Implementation of Bill C-11’s Internet Provider Rules
The government is slated to bring Bill C-11, the copyright reform bill, into effect next week without the “notice-and-notice” rules for Internet providers. The revelations come in a Privy Council document that provides notification on when the bill will come into force. It is expected that the order bringing the […]
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