Copy right, Copy left
Going beyond ‘the signs behind the photocopier’
TESSA VANDERHART, STAFF
There’s much more to Canadian copyright law than whether it’s OK to photocopy your textbooks — but that and much more is at stake, according to a Canadian law professor.
On Monday, Sept. 24, the University of Manitoba hosted a talk called “Copyright/Copyleft” by Michael Geist, Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law, and a professor at the University of Ottawa.
But the talk wasn’t held in a classroom. Geist gave the talk through Elluminate!, a program that combines presentations — like PowerPoint — with instant messaging, video, and sound.
Geist began the talk by dispelling a common misconception: “Cancopy.”
“One professor asked [me] about ‘cancopy law’ — I’d never even heard that expression . . . but it didn’t take long to realize that what this person was really referring to was, in a sense, the signs behind the photocopier, or the leaflets that sometimes get distributed . . . that purport to dictate what kinds of copyright is acceptable within an institution.”
Geist explained that the “Cancopy” information posted on university campuses is provided by Access Copyright, an non-governmental organization, in conjunction with universities. This information, he said, presents a limited perspective of Canadian copyright law — “and it’s all about the rights of the copyright holders.”
He warned that this view doesn’t reflect current Canadian copyright law, but could, as he expects Bill C-60, a revamped Copyright Act, to be debated in federal Parliament this fall.
For examples of positive uses of copyright, Geist cited Postsecret.blogspot.com — where users for years posted their most secret thoughts, which the bloggers then used to publish two books — and fan fiction websites, on which eager readers and watchers use copyrighted characters to publish their own stories and scripts.
In addition to explaining how a number of websites work in the unregulated world of Internet copyright law, various ways in which photos and videos and thoughts and ideas are shared, Geist told participants about Creative Commons, a personal copyrighting site.
Creative Commons users are free to set whatever rights they want on their work — and millions of users have copyrighted millions of documents. Geist said that the project has even expanded around the world, and into an offshoot, Science Commons, which aims to do the same thing for social science research. Even books are available for free via Creative Commons — including a book edited by Geist, which he said exceeded the publisher’s expectation for sales despite being freely available.
Similar projects — Project Gutenburg, Google Scholar and Book Search, Open Journal Search (OJS), and open medical journals — were celebrated for doing similar things: “An exceptional good news story.”
And, according to Geist, more good news is available from the Supreme Court of Canada.
Geist said that the Supreme Court is very balanced with respect to copyright issues, balancing creator and user rights — even re-establishing their statement of what copyright is about from a 2002 ruling initiated because of an artist whose work was electronically lifted from a poster.
The Supreme Court ruled that “excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization” — essentially that overprotection is just as dangerous as under-protection.
In another case, legal publishers sued the law society of the University of Toronto. “What the court had to say there is something that every single educator should know,” Geist said.
And what the court said was that “the fair dealing exception is perhaps more properly understood as an integral part of the Copyright Act than a simple defense. Any act falling within the fair dealing exception will not be an infringement of copyright. The fair dealing exception, like other exceptions in the Copyright Act, is a user’s right. In order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users’ interests, it must not be interpreted restrictively.”
The Supreme Court has even ruled that the fair dealing exception in section 29 of the copyright act must be interpretable for full use in research or private study, even when the research is for commercial projects.
“Not all of the news is good,” though, Geist said.
Bill C-60, copyright reform legislation, was introduced by the Liberal government years ago; Geist speculated that it would be reintroduced this fall, to turn “librarians into locksmiths.”
He warned that Bill C-60 would add impediments to distance education and promote WIPO, the U.S.-favouring World Internet Property Organization.
In 2004, an Heritage Canada “Interim Report on Copyright Reform,” stated that the government should seek out ways to license blogs, “so that educators in particular would pay something,” Geist said.
He also criticized free-web advocates who want all content to be freely available, arguing that it may cause a lock-down of information.
“What we need, I would argue, is not protection for digital rights management, but protection from digital rights management.”
Geist closed his talk by calling for an expansion of fair dealing legislation, an improved plan for a national digital library, and for education professionals to better acquaint themselves with what they can and cannot do with copyright laws.
The full presentation is available at ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle.
