c-32 Archives

Change and the Copyright Modernization Act

Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, with a few exceptions, is now law with the publication of the Governor General Order in Council. The fourth attempt to amend the Copyright Act since 2005 succeeded where Bills C-60 (2005), C-61 (2008), and C-32 (2010) did not.

A lot has changed since 2005 when Bill C-60 was first introduced. That Bill would have made a limited, but important, set of amendments. Its summary reminds us that it would have amended the “Copyright Act to implement the provisions of the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, to clarify the liability of network service providers, to facilitate technology-enhanced learning and interlibrary loans, and to update certain other provisions of the Act.” …

View Post

Did the Supreme Court eviscerate Access Copyright’s business model? A reply to Michael Geist

Michael Geist in a series of recent blog posts claims that the decisions of the Supreme Court in the SOCAN v. Bell Canada, 2012 SCC 36 (SOCAN v Bell) and Alberta (Education) v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), 2012 SCC 37 (Access Copyright) cases eviscerated Access Copyright’s business model.[1] He asserts that the cases make all copying that would be subject to a license from Access Copyright fair dealings. Moreover, he claims that publishers would not suffer significant economic harm if all copying permitted under Access Copyright licenses or model licenses were fair dealings and no educational institution, whether elementary, secondary, or post-secondary, paid a penny for all such uses.

…

View Post

Fair use for Australia?

Earlier this week, the Australian Law Reform Commission published an Issues Paper titled Copyright and the Digital Economy. The paper asked 55 questions about copyright and possible reforms to Australia’s copyright laws. The paper discusses many reforms debated in Canada during the 2009 Copyright Consultations and more recently during the debates and examination of The Copyright Modernization Act (Bills C-32 and C-11) in the House of Commons Special Legislation Committee. These include new exceptions to permit copying for private uses such as format and time shifting, online uses for social media, uses by libraries, archives and for education, and safe harbours for Internet intermediaries.…

View Post

Canada is market for TPM trafficking and bittorrent indexing sites says USTR report

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued a Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets. In the review, the USTR identified markets that typify the problem of marketplaces that deal in goods and services that infringe on intellectual property rights and help to sustain global piracy and counterfeiting. Canada was listed in several of these markets.

According to the USTR “The scale and popularity of these markets can cause economic harm to U.S. and other IP right holders. …

View Post

Some observations on Bill C-11: The Copyright Modernization Act

Last Thursday the Government of Canada introduced into the House of Commons Bill C-11, an Act to Amend the Copyright Act. In a press release describing the Bill, Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Christian Paradis, stated that the Bill will ensure that Canada’s copyright laws “are modern, flexible, and in line with current international standards” and will “protect and help create jobs, promote innovation, and attract new investment to Canada.”

In the press conference announcing the Bill at the Ottawa office of software producer bitHeads Inc.,…

View Post

Copyright and privacy bills to be introduced in House of Commons

The Government will likely introduce new Bills to amend the Copyright Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) within the next few days. The Parliament of Canada Notice Paper for Wednesday September 28, 2011 provides notice that the Minister of Industry and Minister of State (Agriculture) will introduce a Bill entitled “An Act to Amend the Copyright Act” and a Bill entitled “An Act to Amend the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act”. The actual notices are dated September 27, 2011, which means that the Bills could be introduced as early as this Thursday.…

View Post

UK Culture Secretary calls for boldness in dealing with online piracy

UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt wants action to protect and encourage investment in intellectual property. In a Speech given to the Royal Television Society on September 14, 2011 he signaled that the UK was exploring all options available to do so. This includes making it more difficult for online sites that contribute to piracy to stay online and making search engines take reasonable steps to make it harder to access sites that a court has deemed contain unlawful content or promote unlawful distribution of content.…

View Post

What’s next for copyright reform in Canada? (updated)

July 21, 2011 was the first annual general meeting of Music Canada (formerly CRIA). Not surpisingly, an important focus of the meeting was copyright reform. This issue was highlighted by the presence of Minister Moore, the Heritage Minister, a strong supporter of the creative industries, and Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Dean Del Mastro, also an important player in the copyright reform process. They both gave strong indications of what’s next for copyright reform.

MP Dean Del Mastro led off by introducing Minister Moore.…

View Post

Indirect theories of copyright liability

Here is a copy of the presentation I gave at Osgoode’s inaugural IP Intensive Program. The slides deal with theories of indirect infringement in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, and with the safe harbours that also govern the behaviour of Internet

Dan Glover Indirect theories of copyright liability

View more presentations from bsookman

…

View Post

UK moving ahead with graduated response after Hargreaves Review of IP

Last week, the UK government confirmed its intention to implement the graduated response process set out in the UK Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA). Several documents released along with the response to Professor Hargreaves’ Review of Intellectual Property and Growth summarized the UK process and compared it with the graduated response processes enacted in France and New Zealand. See, Draft-Sharing-of-Costs statutory-instrument, Impact Assessment for the Sharing of Costs Statutory Instrument, and Digital Economy Act Appeals Process: Options for reducing costs.…

View Post

Subscribe