Fair Dealing by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dRkXwP

Copyright

Ontario Public School Boards Preparing To Drop Access Copyright Next Year

The Ontario Public School Board Association last week advised school boards across the province that they should prepare to stop using the Access Copyright licence effective next year. The advisory indicates that the Counsel of Ministers of Education, Copyright, which represents education ministers across the country, has received a legal opinion that confirms that K-12 schools no longer require the Access Copyright licence since they can rely on fair dealing for the small percentage of copying in schools that is unlicensed or copied without permission. A 2005 study of copying in Canadian K-12 schools conducted for Access Copyright found that 88% of copying of copyright works already had the necessary permissions without the need for an additional licence. The Access Copyright portion covered as little as 6% of the total copying and given the recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions, the schools believe that this copying is covered by fair dealing.

The advisory to the school boards includes the following (the fair dealing guidelines, which are very similar to the fair dealing policy adopted by the ACCC, can be found here):

October 15, 2012 — 1 comment — News

Are CRIA and the MPA-Canada Now Opposed to Canadian Content Rules?

This week, the government was formally included in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations with the next formal round scheduled for New Zealand in early December. I’ve written extensively about the copyright implications of the TPP as leaked versions of the intellectual property chapter and demands from U.S. copyright lobby groups point to a significant re-write of Bill C-11. Areas targeted for reform in Canada include ISP liability, statutory damages, and extending the term of copyright.

An additional issue has begun to attract increasing attention as the same lobby groups seeking copyright reforms have also put dismantling Canadian content regulations on the table. The IIPA, the lead lobby group for the movie, music, and software industries, told the U.S. government:

IIPA strongly believes that the TPP market access chapters must be comprehensive in scope, strictly avoiding any sectoral carve outs that preclude the application of free trade disciplines. We note that several market access barriers cited by USTR in its 2012 National Trade Estimate report on Canada involve, for example, content quota requirements for television, radio, cable television, direct-to-home broadcast services, specialty television, and satellite radio services. It should be possible to address such barriers to trade in the TPP, and thus augment consumers’ access to diverse content, while promoting local cultural expressions.

Many concerned with Canadian culture have reacted with alarm as the U.S. government has focused on potential changes to television and radio content requirements, classification systems for movies, and online video.

October 12, 2012 — 16 comments — News

Why It’s Time for a Canadian Digitization Strategy Based on Fair Dealing

Last year, the Writers’ Union of Canada and Union des Ã‰crivaines et des Ã‰crivains Quebecois announced that they were joining a lawsuit against HathiTrust, a consortium of U.S. universities that work with Google on the digitization of millions of books. The lawsuit, which was led by the Authors’ Guild in the U.S., challenged the legality of scanning millions of books and placing the books in the HathiTrust Digital Library (HDL). Yesterday, a U.S. court ruled resoundingly for the universities, concluding that the practices fall squarely within U.S. fair use (good analysis from Grimmelman, Madison, Smith and Krews). The case is an important win for fair use and it points to a potential model for Canadian universities that have lagged behind in ensuring digital access to materials.

The HDL, a joint project of the University of California, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, Cornell University and University of Michigan, used digital copies originally scanned by Google to allow for three purposes: (1) full text searches; (2) preservation; and (3) access for people with print disabilities. The universities implemented access to the database of scanned books in different ways. The full text search functionality enabled users to search through millions of books for particular terms. If the book was not in the public domain or there was no authorization from the copyright owner, searches only indicated the page number where the search term was found with no actual text copied. Students with print disabilities were able to access the full-text through a secure system that was not available to the general public or student body.

October 11, 2012 — 2 comments — News

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

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