It is Fair Dealing Week and I’m happy to share a draft of my new forthcoming chapter “Debunking the Fair Use vs. Fair Dealing Myth: Have We Had Fair Use All Along?“. Here’s the abstract: According to conventional wisdom, a fundamental difference exists between the American fair use doctrine and the Canadian (or Commonwealth) fair dealing doctrine: while American fair use can apply potentially to any purpose, Canadian fair dealing could only apply to those purposes enumerated in the statute. Accordingly, fair dealing cannot apply to dealings for other purposes even if they would otherwise be fair. This conventional wisdom …

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The Competition Bureau announced today that it has signed a consent decree with the four major book publishers, which is expected to lower the price of ebooks in Canada. According to the Bureau’s media release, the agreement between the Bureau and Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster follows an 18-month investigation into the ebook industry in Canada.

Conventional wisdom holds that the European Union has opted to apply its competition law to the exercise of intellectual property rights to a much greater extent than has the United States. In a new article, published in Vol. 79(1) of the Antitrust Law Journal, Paul-Erik Veel and I argue that, at least in the context of copyright protection, this conventional wisdom is false.

I love the UofT library system. For me it’s no wonder it has been ranked again as one of the top three research libraries in North America. And if that’s not enough the library is launching a new catalog that will make its already user-friendly catalog easy to use on all devices from smart phones to desktops. If that’s not good enough, let me tell you a less-known fact about the library. Since 2005 the library has been collaborating with the Internet Archive, quietly digitizing thousands of public domain materials and making them freely accessible to all. I don’t know the …

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Michael Geist sez: “I am delighted to report that this week the University of Ottawa Press published The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, an effort by many of Canada’s leading copyright scholars to begin the process of examining the long-term implications of the copyright pentalogy. The book is available for purchase and is also available as a free download under a Creative Commons licence. The book can be downloaded in its entirety or each of the 14 chapters can be downloaded individually. This is the first of a new collection from the UOP on law, technology and society …

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Volume 27(3) of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal is now published. This issue is based on last year’s Orphan Works & Mass Digitization: Obstacles & Opportunities Symposium. It contains eight papers, by Register of Copyright Maria Pallante, Randal Picker, Stef van Gompel, Jennifer Urban, Lydia Pallas Loren, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Matthew Sag, and myself. Here’s the symposium issue webpage. The title of my paper is The Orphans, the Market, and the Copyright Dogma: A Modest Solution for a Grand Problem, and it can be downloaded from here. Here’s the abstract:

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 …

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