Tag: copyright

By Posted on Posted in Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Stationers No Comments Tagged with , , , ,

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 »

By Posted on Posted in Blog, Copyright 2 Comments Tagged with ,

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.

By Posted on Posted in Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Stationers No Comments Tagged with , , ,

The Varsity last Monday published a story with the headline “Post-Access Copyright era off to a rocky start“, and the sub-headline “Professors confused, frustrated by new copyright rules”. Great headlines, for sure, but in reality, that’s probably an exaggeration. My impression, which I have confirmed with colleagues in the UofT library system and the Faculty Association, is that so far the transition to the post-Access Copyright era has actually been even smoother than expected.

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 »