Copyright

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Stationers

Earlier today, Australia’s Productivity Commission released its long-awaited Inquiry Report on Intellectual Property Arrangements. The Productivity Commission was set up by statute to provide the Australian Government independent research and advisory body on a range of economic, social and environmental issues, in order to help governments make better policies, in the long term interest of the Australian community. The lengthy report and its recommendations should be of interest to many readers of this blog. With respect to copyright, one of the Commission’s main areas of study was whether Australia should adopt an open and flexible fair use regime and abandon …

Productivity Commission: Tales of the Widespread Demise of Canadian Publishers are Just That Read more →

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives

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 →

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives

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.

Blog, Copyright

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:

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Stationers

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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 …

Why Tariffs Aren’t Mandatory: Now the Factum Read more →

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright

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 …

Attack Ads, Copyright, and Collusion: Have Canada’s Major Broadcasters Violated the Competition Act? Read more →

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Stationers

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 →