Julianna Yau’s blog

On Friday, I attended Elizabeth Judge’s lecture Presumed Intentions: Implied Licence for Public Body Uses of Copyrighted Works. I was running late all day Friday, and as a result missed the first 10 minutes of Professor Judge’s lecture. She was a wealth of knowledge, and I honesty had a difficult time keeping up—not with the concepts, but with all the information coming at me at once. Because of this, I’m going to keep my summary of the lecture focused on the portion of the lecture which dealt with copyright implications in the case of grant applications and work financed by grants.

The primary concept of the lecture was that, in most cases, an implied consent for the use of works submitted to the government in relation to the reason for the submission.

In the case of grant applications, there are sometimes not implied licences, but clear requirements of licensing agreements as a stipulation of the grant conditions. Without these stipulations, however, we can safely assume that there is an implied licence for the government to use copyrighted works submitted with grant applications for internal governmental use (particularly so that they can perform the necessary functions to process the application).

Matters become more complicated if the government begins to retroactively digitalize work and making it publicly available. In this case, it would be difficult to argue that someone applying for a grant application 30 years ago had provided an implied licence to make the copyrighted works in the application available to the public through a technology not yet being used. While the works are not free of copyright limitations by merely being publicly accessible, there is the question of whether the government is allowed to digitalize the work and make it accessible in the first place.

To look at that issue, we need to consider two things: whether the act falls into the category of the Crown performing key governmental functions, and whether the creator should be forced to make their work publicly accessible. It is important to note that creators are not required to disseminate their work, and the pros and cons of dissemination (and the method of dissemination) vary from one creator and created work to another.

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