Towards reconsideration of the intersection of the charter right to freedom of expression and copyright in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the intersection of freedom of expression (as protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter)) and copyright in Canada. In this thesis, I argue that both lower Canadian courts and the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) should reconsider their approaches to this intersection. Lower Canadian courts have consistently rejected arguments that provisions of Canada's Copyright Act unjustifiably infringe the Charter right to freedom of expression. The SCC, on the other hand, has consistently interpreted provisions of the Copyright Act in such a manner as to result in expanded protection for the expression interests of non-copyright owning parties. It has done so not by relying explicitly on the Charter right to freedom of expression, but through a process of statutory interpretation. I argue that both approaches merit reconsideration. Specifically, I argue that the approaches adopted by lower Canadian courts to the intersection of the Charter right to freedom of expression and copyright are based on now-invalidated approaches to both copyright and to freedom of expression, and are thus themselves invalid; that to the extent to which the SCC's approach to this intersection assumes that the Charter right to freedom of expression can be protected, in the context of copyright, through statutory interpretation alone, that it fails to adequately protect the Charter right to freedom of expression; that other leading national courts from which the SCC has previously sought assistance have explicitly engaged with this intersection, and that the SCC should follow suit; and that the SCC's own copyright and freedom of expression jurisprudence suggests that provisions of the Copyright Act may unjustifiably infringe the Charter right to freedom of expression. These four arguments, taken together, suggest that the time is ripe for reconsideration of this intersection.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".