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I have made an intervention to the CRTC in opposition to FairPlay Canada's so-called "application to disable on-line access to piracy sites". Summary While is is appropriate for the courts to be able to require Internet Service Providers to block access to specific “sites”, it is inappropriate for vertically integrated media distributors to be allowed to do this without a court order. These media distributors are in a conflict of interest when it comes to providing lawful online distribution of media, and their business models are known to induce copyright infringement. Given this conflict we should not only be demanding that court oversight exist prior to blocking, and not as an expensive appeal process, but that government and regulators need to reduce rather than increase the influence of broadcasters and BDUs over Canada’s digital communications networks. Read more: Tweet informing Fairplay of my intervention, as requested by the CRTC. Re-tweet if you agree with my s...

In an earlier article discussing how Bell's CraveTV wasn't competative with Netflix , I suggested I would try to watch a few shows via the streaming sites offered by Canadian broadcasters. The shows I listed were: Flash season 3 premiere: Tuesday, October 4 at 8E on CTV Arrow season 5 premiere: Wednesday, October 5 at 8ET/PT on CTV Two Legends of Tomorrow season 2 premiere: Thursday, October 13 at 8E on CTV Two To this I was planning on adding a few more: Supergirl season 2 premier: October 10 at 8E/7P on Showcase. Once Upon A Time season 6 premier: Sunday September 26 on CTV Marvel's Agents of Shield season 4 premiere was on Tuesday, September 20 on CTV Episodes are only available for streaming on CTV GO (App and website) for less than a week.  I didn't have a chance to catch up on season 5 of Once Upon a Time, and the first episode of season 6 is already locked down to only be viewable to BDU (Broadcast Distribution Undertakings -- Cable, Satellite, Bell IPTV brande...

Dr Danny Kingsley recently concluded a series of articles titled The case for Open Research :   the mis-measurement problem (part 1),  the authorship problem (part 2),  reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses (part 3),  does peer review work? (part 4), and  solutions? (part 5). Anyone wanting to understand some of the complex issues that are top of mind in academic and scientific publishing should read this series.  I found it extremely valuable. The series discusses issues quite different than what some Canadians have been claiming are issues in academic publishing, namely the Access Copyright activism.  Their nonsense claim is that the primary problem is educational institutions using "foreign" free texts and this is pushing out Canadian non-free texts. (See:  "Copyright-free" material is not edging out Canadian educational texts )  This misinformation campaign has even tried to waive the "Digital Canadian Content" ...

The misinformation campaign about the minor clarification to educational fair dealings is ongoing. This includes fictional claims about kids suffering , abusing the standard "why won't they think of the kids" in a way that I believe is harmful to the education of Canadian children. As my minor contribution to the education campaign about the reality of the situation, and who is actually promoting the interests of foreign interests, I sent the following letter to Nigel Hunt about his oddly by-lined Copyright-free material edging out Canadian educational texts . While this article accurately portrays the narrative often spun by John Degen, further investigation into the issue reveals a very different story. Prior to modern communication technology like the internet it was very hard and expensive to get licensing for copyrighted works. To solve this problem Collective Societies were created that offered blanket licensing at fixed fees no matter how many works required licens...

I discussed Collective Societies in the context of this issue in a previous article .  While I started with them, I don't fault them for the battles we keep seeing.  Those representing collectives are just trying to keep these entities alive in a changing marketplace where their value is diminishing.   While this transition is good for authors and users alike, and is one that we should be encouraging, it will eventually lead to some redundant collective societies closing. The problem is that educational institutions have been propping up the legacy publishing methods that these collective societies are dependant on.  These publicly funded institutions have been throwing away taxpayer money at lawsuits and royalty fees which leave the sector (and often the country) rather than modernizing. Educational Institutions When you get past the superficial "authors vs teachers" rhetoric, you find a very different scenario. The most expensive collections of works fall into the ...

Anyone who follows copyright in the news will have heard the epic battles around educational fair use. To hear it from the perspective of those who represent collective societies  it is a battle between starving artists on one hand and thieving big business educational institutions on the other. To hear it from the perspective of educational institutions it is charities providing a public service trying to reduce costs to students and taxpayers any legitimate way they can. The problem is that both of these perspectives are wrong. This article is in two parts, with the second part addressing educational institutions . Collective Societies Collective societies don't "represent" creators, starving or otherwise.  They provide a specific business model service available to copyright holders, and compete in a marketplace that includes a wide variety of other business models available to copyright holders. Collectives don't "represent" creators in the sense that an...

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...

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...