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Canadian Netflix users have noticed that their cross-border access is being denied. Acccording to Michael Geis t, when Heritage Canada official briefed their new minister about Copyright they listed "targeting copyright infringement that occurs on virtual private networks, and “hybrid” legal/illegal services that may be a reference to Canadians accessing U.S. Netflix." While I agree that the use of VPNs to access content otherwise not available in Canada should be considered an emerging issue for the Heritage Minister, the policy proposals I would have are grounded in fairness created by balancing the relevant rights rather than pandering to special interests. As I wrote earlier , I see copyright as an expression of the two parts of article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states: (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefit...

One of the other authors writing a series of articles for Fair Use/ Fair Dealings  week is Meera Nair via her Fair Duty blog.   The use of the word "duty" in the title is explained on her about page  as " to make evident the duty of copyright holders to follow the law and not impede legitimate exceptions to the rights of control afforded by law.  " This will be a theme of my articles this week as well.  I am an author, part of the creator side of the copyright debate.  I spent a considerable part of my life, including attending and writing about most C-32 / C-11 committee hearings, to all too often hear disrespect for the rights and interests of fellow authors from people alleging to represent us. This fairness aspect of copyright law has been used to enable technology which specific politically powerful copyright holders would otherwise have tried to deny the existence of such as the VCR.  It should be obvious that the VCR and the various video captu...

This week is Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week , with Canadians celebrating as well . Understanding fair use/dealing is critical for understanding copyright.  To understand copyright it is best to think of the word "copy" as a synonym for the word "manuscript".  Copyright regulates a series of activities, only one of which is copying.  This series of activities are sometimes referred to as a bundle of rights. While copyright might have originated with written text, copyright currently regulates activities relating to more than manuscripts and thus you will more often read the term "works". Given copyright is about regulated activities, it makes sense to talk about exceptions to otherwise regulated activities using terms like "dealing" or "use".   Fair use/dealing discusses activities which might otherwise be copyright regulated activities, but where an exception is made for the purpose of ensuring copyright remains fair to all parties involve...

My comments on:  Have Millennials Made Quitting More Common? I'm not a Millennial, and nearing 50. I am one of those people who might be considered "disloyal" by those who presume blind loyalty to an employer is a positive trait in an employee. I need to feel passionate about my work.  Paying the bills works for shorter term contracts, but if I'm going to be employed for any length of time I need to feel what I am doing is valuable beyond the salary.  Such a large part of our lives is spent at work, and I want work-life integration and not simply work-life balance. I could be considered disloyal to one of my previous longer-term contracts because I believed that millions of dollars of taxpayer money was being wasted because government lawyers and other policy makers refused to make important data sets open access.  This was data that the government collected, and which Canadian farmers needed access to.  Inexpensive (some free-libre) technology tools to access t...

This is something I've observed before: an attempt to use software code to either route around or mask flaws in legal code .   As hard as it is for technical people to get politically involved and help fix legal code, it is far more likely to succeed than trying to route around the law with code. While it is disheartening to see a technical community launch these projects, I wonder something fishy is going on when a legal community does as was done by IP Osgood with their Orphan Works Licensing Portal Hackathon. They suggest that "hackathons bring together smart people with lots of different expertise to tackle a big issue with intensity, energy and enthusiasm in a condensed period of time".  Even given this I suspect they weren't interested in participation from people who don't consider this to be a problem that could or should be solved with technology. The bug The Canadian bug is in section 77 of Canada's copyright act that deals with "Owners Who C...