The Right of Exclusive Access: Misusing Copyright to Expand the Patent Monopoly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Copyright legislation has been amended in many countries to provide legal protection to access- and use-controlling technology. Canada is considering similar provisions in Bill C-60. This article examines the policy issues that arise when copyright law, in conjunction with anticircumvention technology, is invoked to provide concurrent protection for a patented or patentable device. It discusses the philosophical justification for IP rights protection, including the notion of balancing owner and user interests, and the importance of respecting the different balances on which each intellectual property right lies. The article argues that technology, with its legal protection, can be used to expand the patent monopoly, or even supplant it, effectively eliminating the concept of intellectual property rights' balance. The article identifies and analyses the effects of access- and use-controlling technology on the patent monopoly and, drawing on the experience of other jurisdictions with similar provisions, offers two suggestions to mitigate the risk that the inclusion of anticircumvention provisions in the Copyright Act can be misused to expand the patent monopoly. One recommendation is to change the proposed provisions in Bill C-60 to connect the circumvention of DRM technology with actual copyright infringement and to narrow down the definition of access-controlling technology. The second suggestion is to introduce into Canadian copyright law a statutory cause of action, or defence, similar to the American equitable defence of copyright misuse, which could be invoked to address the improper use of any copyright rights.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".