Category: Antitrust / Competition Law

By Posted on Posted in Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Featured, Stationers 6 Comments Tagged with ,

Earlier this week I participated in the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Symposium on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. I was part of a panel devoted to various solutions to the problem. Here is my presentation.   The Orphans, the Market, and the Copyright Dogma At its core, copyright law is based on a very simple logic–market logic.  The law grants limited exclusive rights in creative works, with the expectation that such rights will then be voluntarily exchanged in a decentralized market place. Whether we believe that exchange will provide the financial incentives for creating the works in the …

The Orphans, the Market, and the Copyright Dogma: Berkeley Orphan Works and Mass Digitization Symposium Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Featured 8 Comments

Barry Sookman’s blog features a post titled “Renewed Attacks on the “Effect on the Market” Factor” and written by his associate Dan Glover. The post opens with an inappropriate and inaccurate ad hominem attack on Howard Knopf and Michael Geist, both of whom he accuses of being on a “crusade to open Canadian copyright law so wide that a convoy of army trucks filled with textbooks and DVDs could drive through it”. Why? Because “they are suggesting that Parliament not clarify that “the effect of the dealing on the market for the original work” is the pre-eminent factor in the fair …

Let’s Talk about the “Effect on the Market”. Seriously. Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Featured 2 Comments

Two issues, fair dealing and digital locks, have attracted most of the attention in the debates about Bill C-11. Little or no attention has been given to a few provisions in the Bill, especially the proposed subsections 30.02(6), (7) and (8), which are buried within a highly obscure and technical part of the Bill. These provisions constitute one of the greatest and boldest copyright grabs in Canadian copyright history. So this post is dedicated to this copyright grab and the organization behind it. It is about a corporation whose business model is based on encouraging a large scale unauthorized use …

Bill C-11 and the Big Access Copyright Grab Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Featured 3 Comments

Supporters of collective administration of copyrights often promote collectives as the silver bullet that solves copyright law’s underlying dilemma: how to provide incentives for creators, without unduly limiting access to protected works.  Collectives often argue that they do both.  This kind of argument was presented to the Supreme Court of Canada last week.  At the opening of his oral argument in the education fair dealing case, Access Copyright’s counsel asserted that the outcome of the case has no effect on students’ access to educational material.  “There’s no issue of access here”, he said.  “The students are going to get the material.  …

Access? Copyright! Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Featured, My Research No Comments

Paul-Erik Veel and I have (finally) posted our new paper on SSRN.  The paper, downloadable here, is called “Beyond Refusal to Deal: A Cross-Atlantic View of Copyright, Competition and Innovation Policies”.  Here’s the abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that the European Union, through the application of its competition law, has opted to subordinate intellectual property rights in the pursuit of competitive markets to a much greater extent than has the United States. We argue that, at least in the context of copyright protection, this conventional wisdom is false. While European antitrust regulation of IPRs does presently seem much more robust and activist …

New paper: Beyond Refusal to Deal: A Cross-Atlantic View of Copyright, Competition and Innovation Policies Read more »