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C-32 Legislative Committee Discussion Marked By Copyright Confusion

By Michael Geist

Today's Bill C-32 Legislative committee hearing, which featured only two witnesses, may have marked a new low given the amount of confusion and misinformation coming from MPs and witnesses.  The panel should have delivered a good debate on C-32 and fair dealing given the presence of the Canadian Teachers Federation and Douglas Arthur Brown, a Nova Scotia writer and Second Vice-Chair of the Writers Union of Canada.  Yet rather than productive discussion and debate, the one-hour hearing featured:

• Brown claiming that the fair dealing exception for education could result in losses of up to 85% of revenues.  When pressed on where the figure came from, Brown said Access Copyright provided it to him. When asked if he had inquired how Access Copyright had arrived at that number, Brown admitted that he hadn't and that the onus should not be on him to do so.  For good measure, Brown stated that there was nothing in Bill C-32 for writers.  When asked to elaborate, he noted that all the exceptions should be removed, even though exceptions such as parody and satire are included in the bill and supported by virtually all creator groups.
• The CTF, which tried to make the case that copying full books is not a common practice (it noted that the average copying per student is 60 pages per year), completely confused the committee by raising both fair dealing and the Internet exception.  During the ensuing discussion, it inaccurately claimed that freely available works on the Internet were not subject to any copyright protection.  If that sounds like it doesn't make any sense, it is because it doesn't.
• Some of the MPs were not much better than the witnesses.  The most notable was Bloc MP Carole Lavallée, who expressed concern with copying portions of a play by Corneille without permission or compensation. Pierre Corneille, the founder of French tragedy, died in 1684, suggesting Ms. Lavallée is now concerned with the copyright implications of quoting from works that have been in the public domain for 275 years.
  

The committee's final hearing of 2010 is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

Full post as published by Michael Geist on December 13, 2010 (boomark / email).