Ariel Katz has a great post that links the story of the four sons in the Passover Haggadah to copyright and fair dealing emphasizing the connection between education and freedom.
Post Tagged with: "fair dealing"
The Supreme Court Copyright Hearings, Day Two: The Fight to Rollback Fair Dealing
As for this particular hearing, the education institutions offered a confused and confusing argument. The problems started from the opening question, with Justice Rothstein opening the door to considering whether short excerpts might be treated insubstantial copying without the need for fair dealing and the schools simply dismissing the possibility. It went downhill from there as the arguments veered between confusing numbers and a failure to address the basic question of why the school’s copying met the six-factor fair dealing test. Access Copyright faced some challenges on the question of whose purpose is relevant when considering fair dealing (it wanted the focus on the teacher, the schools on the student), but the court seems very unlikely to overturn this decision.
The Supreme Court Copyright Hearings, Day One: Fair Dealing Scare Tactics Fall Flat
There were several notable developments and lines of questioning. First, the fair dealing discussion that dominated the Bell v. SOCAN case would be familiar to anyone who has followed the debate on Bill C-11 as the usual suspects trotted out the usual scare tactics. The arguments included SOCAN likening music previews to ice cream samples (and therefore not worthy of being treated as research for fair dealing purposes), CRIA arguing for a “circumscribed definition of fair dealing”, and CSI claiming that including consumer research within fair dealing could put Canada offside its international obligations.
None of these arguments gained any real traction with the court.
CRIA Targets Fair Dealing: Tells Supreme Court New Restrictions Needed on User Rights
- The Purpose of the Dealing – the Court explained that “allowable purposes should not be given a restrictive interpretation or this could result in the undue restriction of users’ rights.â€
- The Character of the Dealing – one should ask whether there was a single copy or were multiple copies made. It may be relevant to look at industry standards.
- The Amount of the Dealing – “Both the amount of the dealing and importance of the work allegedly infringed should be considered in assessing fairness.†The extent of the copying may be different according to the use.
- Alternatives to the Dealing – Was a “non-copyrighted equivalent of the work” available?
- The Nature of the Work – “If a work has not been published, the dealing may be more fair, in that its reproduction with acknowledgement could lead to a wider public dissemination of the work – one of the goals of copyright law. If, however, the work in question was confidential, this may tip the scales towards finding that the dealing was unfair.”
- Effect of the Dealing on the Work – Will copying the work affect the market of original work? “Although the effect of the dealing on the market of the copyright owner is an important factor, it is neither the only factor nor the most important factor that a court must consider in deciding if the dealing is fair.”
University of Western Ontario professor Sam Trosow now notes that the Canadian Recording Industry Association has taken aim at the fair dealing test, submitting a factum to the Supreme Court in a forthcoming case on whether song previews may constitute fair dealing that argues that the court’s analysis is, well, wrong (Trosow also notes the surprise of finding the lawyer representing Canadian universities arguing in favour of this fair dealing test now also arguing against it for the recording industry).
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.
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