Carys Craig is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School

Michael Geist’s edited collection of essays on copyright reform is being released on October 14th, and you are welcome to attend its launch. This exciting and timely publication, entitled ‘From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda’, contains twenty chapters written by copyright scholars from across Canada. It is to Geist’s credit that he was able to pull this book together on a tight timeline over the summer so that the views expressed therein can have a bearing on the reform process as it continues to unfold. Of course, the speed of this process also reflects a keen sense amongst Canadian copyright scholars that something important needs to be said (and heard) sooner rather than later.

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Posted in Copyright, copyright reform, Digital Locks, Fair Dealing, IP, Ownership
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Professor Carys Craig (Osgoode Hall Law School) has a new paper available on SSRN. Her article is described below.

The enactment of anti-circumvention laws in Canada appears imminent and all but inevitable. This article considers the threats posed by technical protection measures and anti-circumvention laws to fair dealing and other lawful uses of protected works, and so to the copyright system more generally. The argument adopts, as its normative starting point, the principle of “prescriptive parallelism” according to which the traditional copyright balance of rights and exceptions should be preserved in the digital environment.

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Professor Carys Craig (Osgoode Hall Law School) has a new paper available on SSRN.  Her article is described below.

This essay explores the important body of scholarship that has emerged on the substance, nature, and role of the public domain in intellectual property law. I offer some concrete definitions of the public domain in the copyright context, identify some ongoing sources of debate in the literature, and highlight some particularly significant voices in public domain discourse.

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Carys Craig is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School.

In copyright law, the term “public domain” is commonly used to describe the sphere in which contents are free from copyright protection. The typical example is that of a work whose protection has expired, or one that fails to meet the minimum requirements.  Such works belong in what Pamela Samuelson has famously called the “core” of the public domain. Also within this “core”, however, are those aspects of copyrighted works that copyright does not protect. Ideas, concepts, theories, systems, methods, facts, information, and unoriginal elements all belong in the public domain, notwithstanding that their expression, description, illustration, compilation, selection or arrangement may be protected.

Even this overtly legalistic definition suggests the inevitable indeterminacy of the public domain. The doctrinal line between public and private will shift over time and with circumstances, not to mention by jurisdiction. The boundaries are even more contentious if we resist the idea that the public domain contains only works or aspects of works devoid of protection. A recurring controversy, for example, is whether particular uses of protected works that fall within exemptions or limitations can be conceptualized as within the public domain. It may seem strange to describe a statutorily permitted use as somehow rendering a protected work public domain in a specific instance. But if we take uses – as opposed to works or parts thereof – as our unit of analysis, we might say that public domain information is (as Yochai Benkler defines it) information “whose use, absent special reasons to think otherwise, is permissible to anyone.”

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Posted in Copyright, IP
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