I appeared today before the Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, in the course of its study of the operation and practices of the Copyright Board of Canada. Here is my testimony:
I am excited and honoured to give the Hong Kong University Public Lecture in IP next Wednesday, Nov 9, 2016. The title of my lecture is “Fair Dealing: Have We Had Fair Use All Along?” The lecture is based on this book chapter. Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that while the fair use doctrine in the United States is omnipresent and flexible, fair dealing, its Commonwealth cousin is more rigid and can only apply to the specifically enumerated statutory purposes. Fair use, on this view, is an American invention—foreign to the copyright traditions of the rest of the common law world. …
Fair Dealing: Have We Had Fair Use All Along? (HKU Public Lecture in IP) Read more »
Pier-Luk Bouthillier is a Montreal graphic designer. He had previously worked as an Art Director for the cultural weekly “ICI Montreal”, and in 2007, he launched his first in a series of environmentally-themed t-shirts. You can see his t-shirts on his website (as well as some ‘Fleur de lys’ boxer briefs). One of Mr. Bouthillier’s shirts, J’aime Montréal, features a few stylized drawings of various Montreal landmarks, organized around the slogan J’♥ Montréal. According to the CBC, this got Mr. Bouthillier in some legal trouble.
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 …
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.