The University of Toronto Library’s Scholarly Communication and Copyright Office and the University of Toronto Bora Laskin Law Library@ organized a terrific conference on copyright in Canada three years after the Copyright Pentalogy and the Copyright Modernization Act. I had the pleasure and honour to be one of the three featured speakers. Here is my talk:
Yesterday, McGill’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and I filed a joint Intervener Factum in the CBC v SODRAC case before the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court granted us leave to intervene with respect to the question of whether tariffs that the Copyright Board approved can be imposed on users. In the decision below, the Federal Court of Appeal (“FCA”) held that a collective management organization (“CMO”) can ask the Board to approve a licensing scheme and then impose it on users. If correct, such users then have no choice other than to deal with the CMO, and must, as …
For years Hollywood has waged war on the open internet. It may have taken freedom of expression for granted and believed that only the open internet puts it at risk. Maybe it should begin rethinking its priorities. It if does, it may discover the open internet protects it as much as, and probably more, than stronger copyright law would ever do.
Last week reports emerged that the Government is considering a new copyright exception for political advertising. The reports suggested that the exception would permit the use of news content by political parties without authorization. While most of the media coverage of this story focused on the copyright issue and the phenomenon of attack ads, documents that Sun Media obtained from the CBC (under an Access to Information request) reveal an even more interesting and more important story, both politically and legally. These documents, offering a rare glimpse behind the scenes of Canada’s major media organization, reveal a picture of a …
Authors Alliance recently joined a coalition of research, science, and education organizations that called on the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) to withdraw a set of New Model Licenses for purportedly “open access” publishing. Beyond the flaws in those Model Licenses, the STM move raises some potentially serious antitrust issues. In other words, by adopting these set of model licenses and recommending that their members adopt them, STM and its member publishers might have broken the law. This is problematic for authors who write to be read, and who deserve a competitive publishing environment that allows them …
STM’s “Open Access” Licenses: Extend, Embrace, and Extinguish Read more →
On May 29, 2014 the Quill & Quire published an article with the sensational title “Why the loss of Access Copyright royalties could be devastating for educational publishers”, which advances the thesis and leads the reader to the supposedly inescapable conclusion that the decision of many educational institutions to sever their ties with Access Copyright has already wreaked havoc with publishers and will continue to be. This is a second of a series of posts in which why these thesis and conclusions do not hold up to scrutiny.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away there was a country named Broadviewlandia. The name Broadviewlandia had been adopted to symbolize that country’s hopes for a new bright future, as Broadviewlandia was slowly emerging from several centuries of feudal social order. Like in many ex-feudal societies, very few books were written in Broadviewlandia and even fewer were published, and the ones that existed were limited, expansive, and beyond the reach of almost all Broadviewlanders.
On May 29, 2014 the Quill & Quire published an article with the sensational title “Why the loss of Access Copyright royalties could be devastating for educational publishers”, which advances the thesis and leads the reader to the supposedly inescapable conclusion that the decision of many educational institutions to sever their ties with Access Copyright has already wreaked havoc with publishers and will continue to be. This is a second of a series of posts in which why these thesis and conclusions do not hold up to scrutiny. Part 1 examined the main smoking gun in the Q&Q article, the claimed …
On May 29, 2014 the Quill & Quire published an article with the sensational title “Why the loss of Access Copyright royalties could be devastating for educational publishers”. Julie Baldassi, the Q&Q staff reporter who wrote the article, advances the thesis and leads the reader to the supposedly inescapable conclusion (despite occasionally inserting words such as “perhaps” or “could”) that the decision of many educational institutions to sever their ties with Access Copyright has already wreaked havoc with publishers and will continue to be. This is a first of a series of posts in which I examine that thesis and conclusions to …
On ordinary days, s. 77 of the Copyright, dealing with orphan works (or in the Act‘s terms “owners who cannot be located”), is probably one of those provisions that get very little attention. But as Howard Knopf reports, not only did Canada’s orphan works regime get some unusual attention during the last couple of weeks, it also stirred some heated mini-controversy at the recent Fordham IP Conference.