Recent Articles

Damn the facts, full term-extension ahead!

July 16, 2008 20:44

Taking a page out of the Canadian handbook, the European Union ignores sound economic and statistical analyses and gives the copyright industry what it wants anyway. This was Andrew Gowers in 2006:  4.32 The incentives argument is sometimes applied to artists as well as to record companies. That i...

Prentice’s parrots

July 08, 2008 22:33

Canadian copyright law strikes proper balance New copyright law is needed in the Internet age Changes to Copyright Act strike a proper balance       Copyright is not a simple issue. While the premise is simple, the application is complicated.         Further, the act should foster innova...

An attempt at quantification

June 16, 2008 18:44

Since Friday, the membership of the Fair Copyright for Canada group on Facebook — which can safely be marked down as “skeptical” when it comes to Bill C-61 — has been growing by one new signup every 18 seconds… more than three per minute… nearly 200 per hour… just unde...

Muddifying and complicating

June 12, 2008 19:13

Back in the simpler times of the copyright debate, like, in 2002, Industry Canada set out a “long-term reform agenda”, defining “long-term” as “beyond 4 years”, which included “clarifying and simplifying the [Copyright] Act”. And now, “beyond 4 years” later, we know can report how well that worked o...

Cue the starving artists!

June 10, 2008 15:02

In the middle of an earlier copyright war, in 1983, Michael McDonald of the Copyright Institute of Canada and Writers Union – both hats are mentioned in the byline – wrote in the Globe and Mail: A recently-released report prepared by Statistics Canada points out that the average income of full-time ...

Perpetuity?

June 09, 2008 20:02

CTV snipes the Ceeb: Toronto, ON - CTV Inc., together with Copyright Music & Visuals, today announced that CTV Inc. has acquired all rights to ‘The Hockey Theme’ in perpetuity That’s a neat trick. Is Dolores Claman planning to live forever?CTV snipes the Ceeb: Toronto, ON -...

This is a joke… right?

May 02, 2008 16:57

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away, a beautiful princess happened upon a frog as she wandered along a winding path through an enchanted forest. The frog hopped up on a rock and said: “My Lady, I was once a handsome prince, until an evil sorceress cast a spell upon me. One kiss from a...

Exclusionary

January 07, 2008 05:11

According to the Vancouver Community College’s copyright policy: The following materials are not covered by our Access© License and permission is necessary to reproduce: Works in which copyright no longer exists in Canada. Perhaps some of the sharper legal minds at Excess© or the VCC can e...

Public Domain Day 2008

January 01, 2008 19:34

Welcome to 2008, and let’s welcome into the Public Domain thousands, indeed millions, of creative works from the collective cultural past of our little planet and its many countries. Yes, it’s January 1st, Public Domain Day in most countries of the world, where copyright runs from the death of the a...

The same “old” line

December 12, 2007 23:33

One of the mantras of the Canadian branch plant of the Big Copyright movement is that Canada’s Copyright Act is just too darn old. The existing Copyright Act derives its statutory ancestry from the Copyright Act, 1921 (11-12 Geo. V. cap. 24), which entered into force on January 1, 1924. (The c...