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....
read more

The GSU Copyright Case: Some Canadian Perspectives

Posted on May 14, 2012 | 1 comment In April 2008, three publishers, Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publications, and Oxford University Press, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Georgia State University, alleging that GSU infringed their copyrights by allowing professors to upload excerpts from books onto the university’s electronic reserve system (ERes). The complaint alleged “systematic, widespread, and...
read more

Berne, Fair Dealing, and other Red Herrings

Posted on Apr 25, 2012 | 0 comments Michael Geist reports that the International Publishers Association threatens Canada with WTO complaint over Bill C-11. The threatening letter mentions the explicit inclusion of education in the fair dealing provision and a few additional minor exceptions. The publishers allege that the provisions violate the Three Step Test found in the Berne Convention and other treaties. These allegations are...
read more

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...
read more

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...
read more

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...
read more