authorization Archives

Are Canada’s copyright laws friendly or unfriendly towards wealth destroyers according to Prof. Geist?

In the last few weeks Prof. Geist has been writing, blogging, tweeting, speaking and even testifying to a Parliamentary Committee about the IsoHunt case and whether there is a need for an amendment to the Copyright Act to create a new cause of action to make online pirate sites and services liable for enabling copyright infringement. His ostensible claim is that representatives of the recording industry secretly filed a copyright infringement claim against IsoHunt three weeks before Bill C-32 was tabled in the House of Commons; kept the suit secret to improve their chances of getting copyright reforms needed to shut the site down – all the while not needing the amendments because they already have the legal tools necessary to put IsoHunt out of business.…

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iiNet court backs reasonableness of graduated response to stop illegal file sharing

Last week the Australian Full Court released its decision in the landmark case Roadshow Films Pty Limited v iiNet Limited, [2011] FCAFC 23. The Australian appeals court by majority dismissed the appeal from the decision of the primary judge who had held that iiNet, an ISP in Australia that had not acted on any information provided to it by copyright owners, was not liable for authorizing the copyright infringement of its subscribers who had used its facilities to engage in unlicensed peer to peer file sharing.…

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C-32 enablement remedy targets secondary copyright infringement

Mark Twain once famously commented, “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” Canadian copyright law bears the burden of his axiom more than most. The pith of our copyright law dates from a 1911 bill passed in the United Kingdom, which we adopted wholesale in the early 1920s, and have not kept current with the changes in time.

Our law, which was designed to deal with player pianos and renegade printing presses, and later traditional broadcast techologies like radio and TV, is occasionally called upon to deal with illegal filesharing on the Internet.…

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Copyright law 2010 –the year in review in Canada and around the world

Here is a copy of the slides I used today at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Intellectual Property Year in Review conference. The associated paper prepared in collaboration with Glen Bloom, and with the help of others, is available here.

My slides summarize the following copyright cases from Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, Singapore, Europe and the USA:

Canada

Bell Canada v SOCAN (Tariff 22) 2010 FCA 220

Canadian Private Copying Collective v.…

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Federal Court of Appeal decides the Satellite Radio JRs

The Federal Court of Appeal released its reasons for decision in two judicial review applications from the Copyright Board’s decision released of April, 2009. Both JR applications were dismissed.

The decision contains several important copyright rulings. In particular:

When an entity provides a service for use with its own designed and manufactured devices e.g., a satellite radio service and radio receiving set, and the use of the device with the service will necessarily result in automatic copying of the content by the user, the provider of the service (in this case XM and Sirius), can be liable for the copying which occurs on the device under a theory of authorization.

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