Roger S. Fisher, Ph.D., J.D. teaches courses at York University on law, humanities and copyright policy. He is a member of the Bar of Ontario and is currently working on a project entitled “Antigone Rests Her Case: Law, Legal Discourses and Discourse Shifting in Sophocles’ Antigone.” 

The law has always had an uneasy relationship with copies, from the story of Moses and the golden calf to contemporary instances of copyright being used by private citizens as an indirect means of censorship.¹ Moses not only reprimanded the Israelites for making their golden calf, he also smashed the tablets of the law in anger (fortunately he went back and got new copies).² The Israelites’ offence was making a similitude (copy) of a false god. The question of copying (the narrow focus of the doctrine of copyright) is no longer a question of theology, but it does invoke a broader question of the aesthetics (and uses) of imitation.

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Posted in Copyright, General, Infringement, IP, Music Industry, Originality
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Roger S. Fisher, Ph.D., LL.B. teaches a course on copyright policy at York University to third year Fine Arts students. He is a member of the Bar of Ontario and currently represents a non-profit academic journal that is one of over two hundred third- and fourth-party defendants in a class action lawsuit involving a copyright claim on behalf of freelance journalists.

My teenage son and his rock band want to put one of their songs on YouTube but are concerned about protecting their composition. A parent, trying to be helpful, suggested they should first do the “poor man’s copyright.” Meanwhile, I hear some children drawing super heroes in the backyard. “You can’t draw that,” I am astonished to hear one say to another, “it’s copyrighted.” Where in the world do young people learn such things? That is a question that comes up in the third-year seminar on copyright law and policy that I teach to Fine Arts students at York University. I am always interested in how they, as aspiring artists, learn about copyright, and how they integrate, or perhaps weave around, copyright in their creative work. What do they know about copyright from the stories they hear? What does the law of copyright look like from below, so to speak, and not from the mountaintop (if you will excuse any implication of hierarchy in the metaphor). What I do find is a great deal of misinformation, and perhaps most of all, anxiety.  Read the rest of this entry »

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