Posts

Showing posts from September, 2017

Copyright Board, Copyright Collectives, and the myth that "Fair use decimated educational publishing in Canada”

(This is a letter in an ongoing dialog with a few members of federal parliament. This email was added to the list of submissions for the Copyright Board consultation.) David McGuinty, my MP in Ottawa South, David Graham, MP (Laurentides — Labelle), The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Copyright Board Consultations I would like to thank David McGuinty for forwarding the September 8, 2017 letter from Minister Joly. This was a response to my May 1, 2017 letter titled “Myth: Fair use decimated educational publishing in Canada”. My letter highlighting some of what might colloquially be referred to as “fake news” being spread globally, primarily sourced from Access Copyright, a Canadian Collective Society. The National Copyright Unit of Australia felt this myth spreading required a response [1] As this myth primarily relates to an ongoing dispute between a collective society and pr

Taxpayers should pay authors for educational uses of works, not intermediaries

Replying to a Letter to the Editor in The Varsity . It is taxpayers and authors that are paying the costs of this ongoing dispute, one way or the other. What we are effectively discussing is a government funding program masquerading as copyright, and because of the misdirection that this is a copyright issue we are allowing intermediaries like educational institutions, collective societies, foreign publishers, and all their lawyers, to extract the bulk of the money. If Mr. Degen was focused on Canadian authors getting paid he would be agreeing with me that we need to redirect taxpayer money misspent with the current regime towards a program similar to the Public Lending Right . The existing Public Lending Right funds authors based on their works being loaned by libraries, and a "Public Education Right" could directly fund authors based on specific uses of their works in publicly funded educational institutions. This would be applied only to that very narrow area o