Copyright Law

Canadian Student Groups Voice Their Opinions on Copyright

By DrewWilson

Among other things, Canadian student unions CFS and CASA have called for expanding fair dealings and avoiding a blanket anti-circumvention legislation. These groups are the latest additions to an ever expanding list of stake-holders calling for an expansion to fair dealings. Of course, these aren’t the only things the two organizations called for.

The way things are going, some might wonder – who doesn’t want an expansion on fair dealings? There are a small number of organizations and entities that don’t want an expansion on fair dealings. Though if one were to look at the submissions in general, those who want to stop the expansion on fair dealings have practically become like endangered species.

The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) had a number of issues that they brought up in their submission. Here’s a sampling:

Extend the successful current single copy exemption and blank storage media levy scheme for the private use of sound recordings, to all digital works. It is a much better solution than trying to stop the unstoppable copying of DVDs and other digital media, and compensates the copyright owners.

Excuse those who use blank storage media exclusively for licensed works, or their own works, from paying the levy, as Australia does.

Fix the term of copyright to a set number of years, without regard to the date of death of the author.

Set the copyright collectives’ obligations to pay out their royalties collected, so that they can not continue to defer payouts indefinitely and keep for their own benefit amounts vastly in excess of their expenses and capital requirements.

Add “parody” as an exception to copyright and moral rights infringement.

This is merely a sampling of the things the CFS has called for. Meanwhile, CASA, another entity representing students interests, had their own ideas on how to reform copyright.

A far better approach to clarifying fair dealing would be to simply expand the definition of users? rights in the Copyright Act with the inclusion of the words ?such as? before the current list of exceptions in sec. 29 of the Copyright Act. As several Canadian legal scholars and commentators have noted, such an approach would create a more open-ended, illustrative and flexible definition of fair dealing rights, in line with the CCH decision.

Rights holders benefitting from copyright have an obligation to provide reasonable fair dealing access to users. If anti-circumvention language is permitted, the government must include measures to ensure that access to materials for non-infringing purposes is allowed in spite of a rights holder?s use of locks, notices, or rights management.

Specifically, our system of copyright must ensure that any new permissive uses of ?digital locks? added to the Copyright Act do not impose barriers to access to information for people with perceptual disabilities. People with a perceptual disabilities often require adaptive technologies to conduct format to format conversion (screen reading software for example) in order to access knowledge and information; ?digital locks? could divest them of equal access to these materials.

Again, this is just a sampling of the calls made by CASA, but they are very interesting ideas indeed.

Already, there have been several calls to expand fair dealings including documentarians, people from the humanities and social sciences, Canadian musicians and Canadians who work in the music business, and hundreds of Canadians from all walks of life to name a few.

One conclusion one can draw off of this is that many Canadians are frustrated with the limitations they have with legally paid for content – hardly the so-called pirate nation the foreign copyright industry would want many to believe.

Of course, there is still time to submit submissions to the Canadian copyright consultation, but time is starting to run out at this point. Canadians have been encouraged from all sides of the copyright debate to participate, so it’s an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed since such an opportunity only came up clear back in 2001; not something that happens very often. At least, so far, there have been a huge number of submissions already in the government consultation – a good sign of a healthy democracy.

[Hat tip: Michael Geist]

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).