The Copyright Board just released its long awaited decision on the scope of the making available right under the Copyright Act. In a well reasoned and thorough decision, the Board ruled that the MAR right applies to the making available of both streams and downloads, acts that have to be exclusive rights in order for Canada to meet its international treaty obligations under the WCT and WPPT.
The Board summarized its reasons as follows:
As will be made clear from the reasons that follow, subsection 2.4(1.1) of the Act deems the act of placing a work or other subject-matter on a server of a telecommunication network in a way that a request from a member of the public triggers the transmission of that work or subject matter, including in the form of a stream or download, whether or not such a request ever takes place, to be a communication to the public by telecommunication.
