Fair Dealing’s Halls of F/Sh/ame

Posted on May 15, 2012 | 2 comments On May 15, 2012 the University of British Columbia announced that it would not sign a license agreement with Access Copyright, and immediately was inducted into Canada’s Fair Dealing Hall of Fame. “We believe we are taking the bolder, more principled and sustainable option, which best serves the fundamental and long-term interests of our academic community”, said David H....
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The Voice of Canadian Universities?

Posted on Apr 24, 2012 | 0 comments I suppose that I shouldn’t have been really surprised, but I am. The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), which on its website calls itself The Voice of Canadian Universities, has just written to the Copyright Board that it withdraws its objection. Here’s what the AUCC writes (you can view the full letter here): On April 16, 2012 AUCC and Access Copyright agreed...
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The Best Possible Outcome for Universities, Really?

Posted on Apr 17, 2012 | 3 comments Access Copyright and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) announced yesterday that they had negotiated a Model Licence that would allow universities to reproduce copyright protected materials in both print and digital formats. In a joint media release issued by Access Copyright and the AUCC, Paul Davidson, president of the AUCC, was quoted as saying “We believe that...
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History Repeats: Publishers, Retailers, and Antitrust

Posted on Apr 15, 2012 | 0 comments At the heart of last week’s antitrust lawsuit, which the US filed against Apple and a group of book publishers, was the publishers’ concern about Amazon’s discounted pricing for e-books. The complaint alleges that the publishers sought to move away from the wholesale pricing model, which allowed Amazon to buy ebook and resell them at whatever price it chose, and institute an...
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The Orphans, the Market, and the Copyright Dogma: Berkeley Orphan Works and Mass Digitization Symposium

Posted on Apr 14, 2012 | 6 comments Earlier this week I participated in the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Symposium on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. I was part of a panel devoted to various solutions to the problem. Here is my presentation.   The Orphans, the Market, and the Copyright Dogma At its core, copyright law is based on a very simple logic–market logic.  The law grants limited exclusive rights...
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Let’s Talk about the “Effect on the Market”. Seriously.

Posted on Mar 16, 2012 | 8 comments Barry Sookman’s blog features a post titled “Renewed Attacks on the “Effect on the Market” Factor” and written by his associate Dan Glover. The post opens with an inappropriate and inaccurate ad hominem attack on Howard Knopf and Michael Geist, both of whom he accuses of being on a “crusade to open Canadian copyright law so wide that a convoy of army trucks filled with...
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