Julianna Yau’s blog

I finally finished my copyright inquiry letter The Honourable Andrew Telegdi, P.C., M.P. for Kitchener-Waterloo, The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry and The Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage. It took a surprising amount of time to make it a concise, one-page letter. Here’s the bulk of it:

When I initially started this letter, it was to urge the government to take care with the upcoming copyright legislation, with synopses on items which need careful attention. With everything which has happened to the copyright issue since early December, I am now writing instead to urge the government to launch a public inquiry into copyright.

Never before have so many Canadians been individually impacted by copyright, nor has the legitimacy of copyright been so fervently challenged by creators and non-creators alike. The issue of copyright is no longer one which impacts only the creative community. Ever since the introduction of personal recording devices into the consumer market, users have been challenging the limits of their rights¹ and creators have been fighting to maintain theirs, while producers and other supporting entities of creators scramble to keep things status quo.

In the past two months, I have taken a step back from all of the politics of copyright with the intent of finding some root causes². Through this exercise, I have found that many of the roadblocks preventing the creative, legal, consumer and political communities from reaching any internal or collective agreement stem from the inability to keep the various issues separate.

One of the few points upon which people have been able to agree is the need for a public inquiry into copyright³. The UK has been pro-active and launched a public consultation of their own on January 8, 2008⁴. Canada needs to follow the example set by the UK and take a leadership role in shaping copyright reform to the needs of all citizens, rather than following the US model by including the interests of only those who can afford the most time and money to invest in lobbying.

Footnotes:
1. See, for example, the case of Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) or any one of the recent cases involving peer-to-peer sharing.
2. http://blog.juliannayau.com/category/deconstructing-copyright/
3. Printed copies of the various blog postings have been included for your convenience as samples of the consensus across persons who represent different perspectives on copyright.
4. http://www.ipo.gov.uk/about/about-consult/about-formal/about-formal-current/consult-copyrightexceptions.htm
A copy of the press release has been included for your convenience.

The postings printed for footnote 3:
http://www.creatorscopyright.ca/op-ed/2007-12-10/modest-proposal-copyright-inquiry
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2007/12/royal-commission-on-copyright.html
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2006/11/parliamentary-committees-and-copyright.html
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2007/10/craig-parks-on-canadas-copious.html
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1536&Itemid=125
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2502/125/
http://johndegen.blogspot.com/2007/12/royal-commission-on-why-were-all.html
http://www.jeremydebeer.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=195
http://samtrosow.ca/content/view/23/1/

Related posts

• Week (or so) in review: Copyright (1)
• Today’s copyright update (0)
• More support for a copyright inquiry (0)
• Copyright Reform Key Protection for Canada’s Artists (2)
• A public inquiry is long overdue (0)

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.

Related posts

• Writing to government about a copyright inquiry (2)
• Russell McOrmond reviews “Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide” (0)
• My comments on the CCC platform (0)
• Jessica Litman - Rethinking Copyright (0)
• An Experiment In Deconstructing Copyright – Part 5 - Copyright Act (2)