There has unsurprisingly been a tremendous amount of coverage and online discussion regarding the economic study commissioned by Industry Canada that found that there is a positive correlation between file sharers and music purchasing. You can read the Globe, the Guardian, or hundreds of blogs on the topic. Or you […]

Fair Dealing by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dRkXwP
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The Economic Impact of the Canadian Entertainment Software Industry
The Canadian ESA has released a commissioned study on the economic impact of the entertainment software industry in Canada. The study finds that it is a multi-billion dollar industry with revenues that exceed those for film exhibition and sound recordings. While the ESA will likely argue that this demonstrates the […]
LibriVox Hits 1,000 Public Domain Audiobooks
LibriVox, the remarkable Montreal-based initiative that is creating audio versions of public domain books, just catalogued its 1,000th book. Launched just over two years ago, the site has 1,500 volunteers and is releasing 60 – 70 new books every month.
Music Publisher’s Takedown Strikes The Wrong Chord
My weekly law and technology column (Toronto Star version, Tyee version, homepage version, BBC version) focuses on the recent battle over the IMSLP. In February 2006, a part-time Canadian music student established a modest, non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools, such as those used by Wikipedia, to create an online library of public domain musical scores. Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured over 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada. Nineteen months later – without any funding, sponsorship or promotion – the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the Internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.
Eleven days ago, the IMSLP disappeared from the Internet. Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, retained a Toronto law firm to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe. The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada fifty years after a composer’s death, Europe's copyright term is twenty years longer.
The legal demand led to many sleepless nights as the student struggled with the prospect of liability for activity that is perfectly lawful in Canada.