Month: October 2016

The news that Chinese technology company GoTech was “disinvited” from the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) trade show in the Netherlands last month after conditional access technology provider Nagravision won a $100 million lawsuit against the Chinese company in Texas for manufacturing set top boxes designed to circumvent access controls for Pay-TV platforms brought back memories of the long saga fought by satellite providers in Canada to stop illegal accessing of DirecTV’s satellite signal by Canadians. Given that DirecTV is not licensed to distribute content in Canada, a variety of devious means were used to “trick” the system into believing that the Canadian subscriber resided in the US, usually aided by middle-men who exploited the grey market by setting up accounts in the US, and then selling them in Canada. Given the footprint of DirecTV’s satellite, the signal is easily received in many parts of Canada. It required some technical tweaking to ensure the receiver was properly tuned, but that was part of the “service” provided. Continue reading “Content in the Sky and in the Cloud: It’s Not Free”

The news that Sweden’s Nobel Prize selection committee has awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to noted songwriter Bob Dylan is exciting news. The Nobel Prize has a long pedigree and the prize for literature has previously been awarded to such noted authors as William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemmingway, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many other familiar names, and in more recent years to Alice Munro, Patrick Modiano, and Svetlana Alexievich. The prize itself dates back to 1895 when industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, left most of the wealth in his will to establish the prizes the first of which were awarded in several categories, including Literature, in 1901. Continue reading “The Nobel Prize for Bob Dylan: Songwriters Rejoice!”

Oh Google! You’ve done it again! You have taken a good idea—one that could help creativity–and once again blotted your copybook by antagonizing the creative community you profess to serve. Yet again you have turned a blind eye to the rights of writers and creators to serve your own ends, all in the name of “progress”. First it was the digitizing of all those books in public libraries—without the approval of the authors of those works. Then, once the works were digitized you indexed them by putting up large excerpts on the web for free use without as much as a “by your leave” to the copyright holders. While this could be seen as somewhat akin to a digital version of flipping through a book in a library, looking at excerpts, there is a big difference because a) the library has purchased the book and b) the library’s users are all pre-qualified in some way, as residents or students for example. I know that this “transformative use” has been ruled to be within the four corners of fair use by the US courts, but it doesn’t mean that it is morally right. Continue reading “The Great Scoop: Feeding Google’s AI Machine”

The Need for Regular Copyright Review

Five years after the introduction of the Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11) in 2012 under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, preparations are being made for the statutory five year review in late 2017 by the relatively new Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. The 2012 Act, which brought Canada’s copyright laws into the digital age and implemented legal changes required to give effect to Canada’s accession to the WIPO Internet treaties, satisfied some copyright stakeholders and dissatisfied others, as is often the case with legislative change. New fair dealing exceptions for education were introduced, a move that has severely damaged the Canadian educational publishing industry, and which many publishers and authors would like to see repealed or narrowed. Some of the new provisions were phased in and it is only relatively recently that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been legally required to forward infringement notices to those on their network. This system is still being “broken in”, and has suffered some teething pains. Given the lengthy delay that occurred prior to the passage of C-11 (Canada signed the WIPO Internet treaties in 1997 but it took fifteen years before implementing legislation was adopted), a legally mandated legislative review every five years is a good idea. In the fast moving digital age, there will always be a need to take stock of how well the regulatory framework responds to the real world of consumers, creators and industry. Continue reading “Copyright Review in Canada: Myths and Facts”