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

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Canada’s education system is facing a potentially-serious problem. While many educational institutions believe, correctly in my view, that they have better alternatives to comply with the Copyright Act than licenses from Access Copyright, Access Copyright continues to push for rulings that would allow it to impose itself on educators and, essentially, collect a hefty “education tax”–as it will inevitably be called–from Canada’s educational institutions. Access Copyright believes, incorrectly in my view, that a tariff approved by the Copyright Board can and will become mandatory on any institution that may be held liable for making a single infringing copy of a …

Ottawa, we have a problem Read more →

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives

The late L. Ray Patterson, a copyright scholar, historian, and the author of important books on the history of copyright and the notion of users’ rights, had warned that copyright guidelines could be the Trojan Horse of publishers. Patterson referred to a particular type of carelessly written guidelines, those purporting to offer “bright lines”, and provide them by creating unnecessary limitations on users’ rights. The danger, Patterson illustrated, is that guidelines stating that to copy “1,000” words is a fair use, [imply that] to copy “1,050” words is an infringement. …[I]f librarians go along with [such] guidelines, why should not …

The AUCC Guidelines: another Trojan Horse? Read more →

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, My Research, Stationers

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 …

Isn’t that great? Read more →

Blog, Copyright

There have been very few details but a great deal of controversy about Héritage project, the ten-year digitization project undertaken by Canadiana.org. The project promises to digitize and make available some of Canada’s most popular archival collections—encompassing approximately 60 million pages of primary-source documents from the collections of Library and Archives Canada, Canada’s national library. Despite the lack of full details, a project summary document dated April 30, 2013 reveals the following:

Blog, Patent

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced yesterday that it “has throttled a notorious patent used to wrongfully demand payment from cities and other municipalities that use tracking systems to tell transit passengers if their buses and trains are on time.” According to the EFF, “The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has drastically narrowed the patent owned by ArrivalStar after EFF filed a formal request to reexamine the patent’s legitimacy with the help of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at Berkeley Law. The ArrivalStar patent had been used as the basis for dozens of lawsuits against entities …

Troll Alert: Dovden Investments / ArrivalStar Read more →

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives

The University of Toronto, who, together with the University of Western Ontario singed an infamous license agreement with Access Copyright last year, decided not to renew the agreement. In a letter dated June 6, 2013 UofT’s Vice President and Provost Cheryl Misak notified Access Copyright of its decision. Prof. Misak’s letter mentions “the passage of the Copyright Modernization Act, the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2012 copyright rulings, technological change, changes in the scholarly publishing world, and the broadening reach of open access initiatives (among other developments)” as reasons behind its decision. In making this decision UofT follows the footsteps of …

The University of Toronto Leaves Hall of Shame: On the Road to Deserved Fame Read more →

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives

The New York Times yesterday published an excellent op-ed, by Chief Judge Randall Rader and Professors Colleen Chien and David Hirick on the issue of patent trolls. It follows an announcement by President Obama regarding measures against patent trolls made the day before. The authors explain that the problem of patent trolls stems largely from the fact that in the current legal system “trolls have an important strategic advantage over their adversaries: they don’t make anything.” Therefore, “they need not fear a counterclaim for infringing some other patent. They need not be concerned with reputation in the marketplace or with their employees …

It’s Only a Northern Troll Read more →

Blog, Copyright

(An updated version of this post is available on the Huffington Post). You would think that in a constitutional democracy such as Canada, people would feel free to comment on current events and criticize politicians and senior officials by referencing common symbols, such as images of bank notes, to drive home their message. You would think so, but apparently, the Bank of Canada does not. It turns out that the Bank of Canada has taken upon itself an extraordinary mission: to control what people think about the Canadian currency.

Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Stationers

To opt out or not to opt out? This is the question that UofT and Western are currently facing, as the initial term of their license agreements with Access Copyright is about to end, but will be renewed automatically unless they choose to terminate by the end of the next month. The question may not be as existential as Prince Hamlet’s, but like the him, the universities will have to decide whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Agreement, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?