The webcasts of the five Supreme Court of Canada copyright appeals are now available. The ESA/Bell v SOCAN “communicate to the public” and the SOCAN v Bell fair dealing cases can be viewed here. (They are streams and not downloads and so are communications.) The K-12 Access Copyright and Re:Sound appeals can be viewed here.
Archive for the ‘Copyright’ category
Webcasts of the Supreme Court copyright cases now available
December 9th, 2011Posted in Copyright, Fair Dealing, Fair Use, communication to the public, fair dealing for education
Tags: barry sookman
UK: “not practical” to adopt US fair use
December 9th, 2011The UK will not adopt US fair use. This was revealed in statements made by Baroness Wilcox, the UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Business, Innovation and Skills and John Alty, Chief Executive and Comptroller General, Intellectual Property Office, in testimony before the UK Business, Innovation and Skills Committee on November 15, 2011.
Here is a extract from the testimony.
Q219 Chair : At the time, there were assertions that companies such as Google would not start up in this country because of the UK copyright law. Do you still hold that theory now and will Government policy reflect that or accommodate Google?
Posted in C-11, Copyright, Fair Dealing, Fair Use, fair dealing for education
Copyright coming to the Supreme Court of Canada
November 25th, 2011The copyright bar and the Supreme Court are gearing up for two big days of copyright appeals. The five appeals are being heard back to back on December 6 and 7, 2011.
Earlier today the Court circulated the draft schedule for the arguments. It lists all the parties, the interveners, the lawyers involved, and the order in which the cases are going to be heard. It is going to be a very interesting two days for copyright in Canada.
Jurisdiction in the Internet Age
November 5th, 2011Below are slides used by my colleague Dan Glover in a presentation on Friday at the Canadian Council on International Law’s (CCIL) Annual Conference. His talk was on jurisdiction in the internet age.
Glover ccil internet_jurisdiction_slides.ppt
View more presentations from bsookman
ITCan Annual IP Update
October 28th, 2011I had the pleasure of attending ITCan’s 15th Annual Conference yesterday. I moderated the Annual IP Update. I also gave the upate on copyright, pitch hitting for Casey Chisick who had to go to court. My slides are below
View more presentations from bsookman
Posted in C-11, Copyright, Presentations, copyright reform
Supreme Court denies leave in satellite radio copyright case
October 21st, 2011Yesterday the Supreme Court denied CSI’s motion for leave to appeal in the CSI v Canadian Satellite Radio Inc. case. The result leaves standing the decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in Sirius Canada Inc. v. CMRRA/SODRAC Inc., 2010 FCA 348. This decision dismissed two judicial review applications from the Copyright Board’s decision released in April, 2009.
The decision of the Federal Court of Appeal contained several important copyright rulings. In particular the Court ruled that:
Hyperlinking and ISP liability clarified by Supreme Court in Crookes case
October 20th, 2011The Supreme Court released its reasons in Crookes v. Newton 2011 SCC 47 yesterday. The legal issue in the appeal was whether hyperlinks that connect to allegedly defamatory material can be said to “publish” that material. The majority of the Court concluded that a hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as “publication” of the content to which it refers. Although the case dealt mainly with that issue the Court gave expansive reasons which will have significant impacts on future cases involving Internet defamation, freedom of expression on the Internet, and the liability of ISPs for dissemination of defamatory or infringing content.
Copyright Bill C-11 gets second reading in the House of Commons
October 19th, 2011Yesterday Bill C-11 was given second reading in the House of Commons. The statements by the Government and opposition parties can be found here.
For the record, Industry Minister Christian Paradis said the following in speaking about the Bill in the House:
Mr. Speaker, as you know, this is the second time that the government has introduced this bill. During the previous Parliament and for almost a year, the Copyright Modernization Act—then known as Bill C-32—was carefully examined and debated by parliamentarians and stakeholders.
Posted in C-11, Copyright, Piracy, TPMs, WIPO Treaties, copyright reform
Tags: barry sookman Bill C-11 canada copyright reform house of commons
Belgium ISPs ordered to block The Pirate Bay
October 11th, 2011On September 26, 2011, the Antwerp Court of Appeal ordered two Belgium ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. The ISPs, Telenet and Belgacom, were ordered to implement DNS blocking on 11 domains to do this.
The legal basis for the order was Article art. 87, §1, al.2 of the Belgian Copyright Act. This provision transposes Article 8(3) of the EU InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/CE. This Article provides that
“Member States shall ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right.”
ASCAP case highlights differences in Canadian and US copyright law (updated)
October 4th, 2011The influential US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in ASCAP v RealNetworks that a download of a musical work is not a public performance under the US Copyright Act. According to the Court downloads of musical works are not musical performances that are contemporaneously perceived by the listener.
“They are simply transfers of electronic files containing digital copies from an on-line server to a local hard drive. The downloaded songs are not performed in any perceptible manner during the transfers; the user must take some further action to play the songs after they are downloaded. Because the electronic download itself involves no recitation, rendering, or playing of the musical work encoded in the digital transmission, we hold that such a download is not a performance of that work, as defined by § 101.”
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