Canadian Copyright: A Citizen's Guide

Murray, Laura J & Samuel E. Trosow. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen's Guide. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006. 254 pp. 24.95 CND. ISBN-978-1-897071-30-4. ∞ This title from two academics (Murray of Queen's University English Department and Trosow of Western's Faculty of Information & Media Studies and Faculty of Law) attempts to serve the dual purpose of being a user's guide to copyright as well as an argument about copyright policy. The book is divided into four parts: a short section on philosophical and economic justification for copyright; a section on the Copyright Act and recent legal decisions; the longest section, which treats several creator and user communities in a series of short chapters; and a final section that proposes alternatives to the Anglo-American copyright legal tradition. Each chapter contains a short list of useful resources to aid creators and users in understanding copyright and the volume includes a short bibliography. There are also eleven tables on aspects of law among the nineteen chapters, including duration of copyright in various content forms, copyright and education, forms of intellectual property and other very useful information. Taken together, the resource citations, the tables, and the bibliography will assist both creators and users in understanding the complexity of the law in Canada. The authors mince no words in stating their own position on copyright law: it is, for the most part, a corporate conspiracy aimed at limiting the ownership rights of creators and the rights of consumers: Throughout history, it is the larger book trade - today the 'cultural industries' or 'tech sector' - that has demanded expansion of copyright, often using the rhetoric of authors' right to do so, (p. 21). The authors correctly point out that the purpose of copyright is to protect, for a limited period of time, the ownership of an original work that shows an exercise of skill and judgement in creation, housed in a fixed format. They challenge the notion of originality, claiming that there is little that is original in the creative arts; most writing, film-making and sound recording being built upon the creations of predecessors (p. 43). So how do new creators make use of a cultural heritage in a manner that respects the ownership rights of others? This is the countervailing element of the copyright tradition: the notion that permits uses for education, criticism and reporting gathered under the poorly-defined concept of users' rights. These are the exceptions to copyright found in sections 29 (fair dealing and educational institutions) and 30 (archives, libraries and museums) of the Act. Unlike its U. S. counterpart, the Canadian Act does not set forth 'tests' for a defence of fair dealing. For this reason, advocates of 'fair copyright' in Canada (Murray operates a blog titled, 'faircopyright') have spent the past four years praising the Supreme Court of Canada decision in CCH Canadian Ltd. v Law Society of Upper Canada. That decision effectively read into interpretation of the Act six questions to determine whether the dealing is fair or foul: the six questions are remarkably similar to the fair use test set forth in the United States legislation. This should assist in expanding the notion of fair dealing (one of the Court's balancing efforts), but it does not satisfy the authors: Canada's fair dealing provisions have major limitations. Before you can get to the analysis of fairness you have to show that, strictly speaking, the use was made for the purpose of research, private study, criticism, review or news reporting, (p.122). Much of what they write sounds reasonable and few would argue with their claim that users should fully exercise the rights granted under the legislation. It is when Trosow and Murray begin to expand their claims to uncharted territory that a reader may pause before accepting their argument. For example: In principle, we see no contradiction between taking a generous view of users' rights and enforcing commercial infringement: it is absolutely crucial to distinguish the legitimate exercise of users' rights from industrial-scale criminal copyright infringements - as far too little public discussion does, (p. …

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