Julianna Yau’s blog

Concepts of user rights are difficult to discuss without it ending in a shouting match because they cross over so many different copyright and non-copyright related issues. The biggest threat of user rights is that they often directly challenge creators’ rights:

• creative reuse – challenges concepts of creativity, authorship, moral rights, copyrights
• parody – challenges concepts of authorship and moral rights
• private, personal copying – challenges concepts of copyright and business models
• right to resell – I would actually like to explore this later in contrast to the concept of first sale rights and the implications of these concepts when works are available in digital formats

I debated myself on whether “making available” should be part of the list of user rights. Personally, I see that as something which should be licensed/contracted by a creator and not legislated…but I am also trying to deal with these concepts outside of legislation as much as possible so that I can deal with the issues rather than the politics. After some initial thought, I decided that I would like to start by putting the concept of “making available” as a creator’s right and later explore the overall option of creators offering different rights to users. We’ll see how well that works when I delve into that level of this exercise.

And what about consumer rights, like those surrounding the issues surrounding vendor choice, etc, impacted by the whole mess of TPM/DRM? For now, I am going to leave that as a floater issue which has been manifested by the concepts of copyright and how it is being administered, and not one of copyright itself. I am, however, interested in exploring issues of accessibility of works (pre- and post-digital-world) in relation to user rights.

I’m not able to think of anything else to add to the list of user rights (in terms of copyright) at this point, and am feeling that I’ve allowed my thinking to be restricted by what’s currently in the Copyright Act. If anyone can think of other user rights on the copyright front, please let me know.

There are now reports that there will not be a levy for mp3 players:

• iPod Levy – Copyright Board decision quahsed by Federal Court of Appeal
• Federal Court of Appeal Kills iPod Levy
• Appeal Court rejects iPod levy

Geist indicates that “it also means that Canadians who copy music from their CDs to their iPods are not covered by the exception and thus arguably infringe copyright.” Perhaps I’m being blokeish, but I really don’t understand how that is the case because the Copyright Act currently includes a provision allowing copying for private use to not be infringement. I don’t understand how a tariff can be imposed on a legislated right. Although I am strongly against unauthorized distribution of a creator’s work, the mp3-player levy has been positioned as something to address private copy, not p2p sharing of music or other activities… at least, that’s what it seems like in the rather ambiguous presentation of the levy.

What also concerns me is the absence of any mention of the removable electronic memory cards in the Secure Digital, MultiMedia, and Memory Stick formats with more than 256 MBs of memory, etc which were part of the proposal. Is the tariff on those items a go or a no-go? As an artist (who recently purchased a new digital camera!), a tariff on digital media is extremely concerning to me because of the variety of uses of media. I use SD cards to store the photos of my own sculptures which I have taken, and USB drives and CDs to store my own files for business uses. Although I recognize that not everyone is as mindful of copyright as I am, I also find it very difficult to believe that, with the current prices and variety of mp3-players, many people are using anything but an mp3-player to store their songs (whether obtained legitimately or not).

Here is the letter I wrote in response to the Private Copying Tariff, sans address, for anyone who is interested in my original response/analysis of the proposal. Comments/critiques/etc are welcome…just keep it civil.

Update, later on Jan 11, 2008: Seems like I was being a bloke. Geist sent me a message on Facebook to point out that if I were to read the Private Copy section of the Copyright Act more carefully, I would have noticed that it applies to personal copies onto an “audio recording medium”… and the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that an mp3-player is not an audio recording medium. Damn.