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:
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 …
For years Hollywood has waged war on the open internet. It may have taken freedom of expression for granted and believed that only the open internet puts it at risk. Maybe it should begin rethinking its priorities. It if does, it may discover the open internet protects it as much as, and probably more, than stronger copyright law would ever do.
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 …
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 »