(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...Unauthorized music filesharing is already infringing in Canada, clarified under C-61
There is a common claim you will hear in Canada about music filesharing: that the “private copying” regime makes it all legal in Canada. There was a comment to this effect in this blog after an article where I described how the recording industry has thus far chosen not to sue people for infringement in Canada.
While I am not a lawyer (IANAL), and nobody knows for certain what a court will say until after they have said it, all evidence I have seen (the law itself and related court cases) suggests that those who think that unauthorized filesharing (of music or non-music) is currently non-infringing in Canada are working only on wishful thinking.
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(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Access and use “technological measures” - a legal distinction without a technological difference?
Last Friday I had the opportunity to speak with a lawyer that was trying to understand the differences between “access controls” and “use controls” in the context of technological measures used by copyright holders. Bill C-61, in the definition of “technological measure”, makes a differentiation. In our discussions she observed that nearly every technological measure that controls the “use” of a copyrighted work restricts “access” to the work first. It was then asked if if was appropriate to differentiate between the two at all.
I’m a technical person, and while I love to talk to lawyers about technology law, I can’t answer why lawyers want to make this distinction. All I can do is share my technical knowledge, and hope that the legal community will author and interpret laws that make sense.
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(9 votes, average: 8.11 out of 10) Loading ...Does DRM and anti-circumvention legislation increase unauthorized P2P?
There is an all too common belief that putting a legal layer around “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) to encourage its usage will decrease copyright infringement. The USA, being the primary source of that thinking from their National Information Infrastructure Task Force work in the early 1990’s, was of course the first country to implement this thinking in their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The USA DMCA was signed into law on Oct. 28, 1998, and nearly a decade later every report I see suggests that unauthorized P2P sharing of copyrighted files is on the rise in the United States. While this will come as a shock to people who thought the DMCA would (or think the Canadian Bill C-61 will) decrease copyright infringement, the increase seems very logical to me.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Copyright: locks, levies, lawsuits or licensing? Part 4: licensing
In this series we have been talking about three ways of enforcing copyright: locks (part 1), levies (part 2) and lawsuits (part 3). This article is intended to discuss an alternative to enforcement which is licensing the specific usage.
We really need to ask ourselves an important question in the copyright debate: are potential customers of copyright holders not paying because there is some break in the morality of society leading more people to break the law, or because copyright holders are not offering their works in a manner that customers wish to pay for it?
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Copyright Q&A with Tom King, NDP candidate for Guelph
The latest I have read is that by-elections for Guelph, Westmount–Ville-Marie, and Saint Lambert will be called on July 20 with a vote set for Monday, September 8. Those of us that consider fair copyright to be an important election issue are already excited by the candidacy of Tom King, a celebrated Canadian author, broadcaster, and University of Guelph professor (Read his “About me” for details — you will very likely already know of him)
Mr King has indicated he will make copyright fairness an issue during the by-election, and has already announced an event in Toronto on July 24, 2008 to meet with regional artists, activists and academics who are opposed to the Conservatives’ Bill C-61.
The following is my Q&A with him.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Copyright Q&A with Michael Byers, presumptive NDP candidate for Vancouver Center
A Hill Times article NDP’s ’star’ candidate Byers sets sights on Vancouver Centre describes how a best-selling author and academic, Michael. Byers, is seeking the nomination in that riding. I decided to do a written interview with Mr. Byers on copyright, included below. It looks like Vancouver Center will be an important riding to watch for those of us interested in copyright.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Copyright: locks, levies, lawsuits or licensing? Part 3: lawsuits
In this series we have been talking about three ways of enforcing copyright: locks (part 1), levies (part 2) and lawsuits. In the future I will clarify an alternative to enforcement which is licensing (part 4) the specific usage.
In part 1 I stated that copyright is merely a series of activities which someone can do with human creativity that requires permission of the copyright holder to do legally. If you do one of these things without permission, the copyright holder has the right to sue you.
For a variety of reasons, however, many copyright holders are not happy with this situation. They keep asking the government to make copyright “stronger” by requiring permission for an ever-growing number of activities, for an ever-growing amount of time, but they are not wanting to actually sue people who infringe copyright. Sometimes copyright holders want to scapegoat someone other than the infringer, such as the rhetoric around blaming so-called “enablers” which are most often the providers of multi-purpose technology or services, or they want someone else to do all the enforcement.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Copyright: locks, levies, lawsuits or licensing? Part 2: levies
I have expanded this discussion to include licensing (Part 4), with this being the obvious option that doesn’t get discussed. Sometimes instead of trying to use locks (part 1), levies or lawsuits (part 3) to enforce a specific business model, that using an alternative licensing mechanism would work better.
I covered the topic of levies before on this blog with an article titled “Analyzing when copyright levies are a good idea, and when they are a very bad idea.“. In this article I spoke about what are called “compulsory licenses” where a copyright holder can no longer require permission for an activity, but where a royalty fee is imposed. I gave a suggested test for the extreme situation that warrants such an exception to copyright, and tried to apply this test across a few different proposals (The Songwriters Association of Canada proposal that I support, and the Creators’ Copyright Coalition proposal which I strongly reject).
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Blogging is not like traditional media - Part 1
People who read my contributions to this blog have noticed me say “Part 1″ a few times. This happens when I start a topic that I know will take more than a few pages, and I know that too many pages doesn’t work well on a blog. So I plan to break the article up.
Sometimes, however the “Part 2″ never happens. The main reason is a lack of feedback that drives interest in pursuing a given story.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Where is that “buy me now” button for Copyright?
Much of the copyright debate reads like fiction. People supposedly find content on the Internet which has a “buy me now” button and a “take without paying” button, and they choose the latter. The non-fiction version of this story is very different. For the vast majority of content which people can acquire illegally on the Internet, there is no way to purchase the same thing legally. It is very hard to share the “moral outrage” that some entertainment industry lobbiests have been exhibiting, especially since they made deliberate business choices which caused their problems to be far worse.
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