Property enforcement or retrogressive measure? Copyright reform in Canada and the human right of access to knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is it true that, before the recent cases that are said to have redefined its path, Canadian copyright law was missing a purpose? This article presents an alternative view, based on domestic and international human rights law. It argues that the recent “upbringing” of users’ rights in Canada in reality reflects the implicit entrenchment of the so-called human right of access to knowledge in the domestic legal system. The article starts with a critical analysis of Canadian copyright case law, presenting some unsuspected problems in what the scholarly literature calls “the trilogy” – the group of cases that is believed to have unveiled the principle of balance in Canadian copyright law. It calls for an integral approach to users’ rights, which does not ignore the complex fabric of decisions that provides for the internalization of international human rights in Canadian law. Arguing that the Supreme Court of Canada should explicitly acknowledge this relation, the article sketches a framework for understanding how a human right of access to knowledge, if present in the international human rights system, would also be found within Canadian law itself. Finally, the article denies the supposed human rights nature of copyright, and, conversely, argues that several different instruments within the United Nations system provide solid grounds for grasping the existence of a human right of access to knowledge. Understanding, that users’ rights are human rights has important implications for copyright policy. The most important of all is the presumption against retrogressive measures, which would oblige those who push the ongoing process of copyright reform in this country to prove that any additional layer of protection would be legitimate within a human rights context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".