CHQR, a Calgary radio station, hosted CRIA's Graham Henderson yesterday for a 30 minute segment in which Henderson went through the CRIA view on P2P, Gwen Stefani downloads, and private copying. Apparently some listeners found the segment one-sided and the radio station asked if I would provide another perspective. Both […]
Fair Dealing by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dRkXwP
Copyright
Our Own Creative Land
I am pleased to announce that I will be delivering the 2006 Hart House Lecture at the University of Toronto on March 30, 2006. The title of my lecture is Our Own Creative Land: Cultural Monopoly and the Trouble With Copyright. Organizers are printing a copy of the lecture, which […]
Access Copyright’s Distribution Fact Finding Study
In addition to the launch of the Public Domain Registry project, Access Copyright has also announced plans to study its distribution system. The Creators' Copyright Coalition reports: "Access Copyright' s newly announced fact-finding process is a response to a proposal several creator organizations made to the agency last summer. The […]
OAK Law Project
The Queensland University of Technology has launched the Open Access to Knowledge Law Project. The project sounds like an exciting initiative as it will develop legal protocols for managing copyright issues in an open access environment and investigate provision and implementation of a rights expression language for implementing such protocols […]
Music and the Market
In case you missed it, last week CRIA was back in the news claiming that Canadian copyright law is in need of reform, arguing that Canadian digital download sales have not met expectations. The copyright lobby group chose to focus on sales of Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl. In the U.S., the song has become the first to reach one million paid downloads. By comparison, in Canada it has hit 20,000 paid downloads. CRIA argues that based on population and broadband penetration rates, the Canadian figure should be 150,000.
I find this argument rather remarkable. CRIA is obviously hoping to convince Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda and Industry Minister Maxime Bernier that the Canadian digital music market has been hurt by the absence of anti-circumvention legislation, yet the notion that music sales are a function of population size and broadband access is certainly subject to challenge.
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