After Swift Shakes it Off with Spotify, US Copyright Office Promises to Shake it Up

The US Copyright Office has published a report that, at the very least, promises to reopen the debate surrounding rights of remuneration for performers and makers of sound recordings. This followed huge publicity generated in the United States about artist remuneration rates for webcasting, which in turn was sparked by pop pixie Taylor Swift’s pronouncement that her […]

Intellectual Property, Politicians, and the Press: Who’s Protecting the Public Good?

It’s hardly surprising that politicians and members of the press often find themselves at odds with one another, as the two have a long history of conflicting priorities and mandates. Yet the two entities occupy complementary and at times oppositional roles in serving the public good. The recent debate surrounding leaked information about possible copyright […]

Have Europeans Become Less Exhausted After Recent Copyright Decision?

Last week, the big news in the video game blogosphere was the reported sale of the world's largest video game collection, comprising over 11,000 games, for more than $750,000 at auction. While the most salient fact of this story may be the magnitude of both the collection and the winning bid, the large numbers obscure a […]

Canadian Digital Copyright's Second Decade: What's at Stake

For the first time in some twenty years, Canada’s copyright law framework is set for the foreseeable future. Previous attempts (in 2005, 2008, and 2010) to update the country’s copyright legislation for contemporary realities were stalled or aborted due to the problematics of successive minority governments during the mid-2000s. After attaining a parliamentary majority in 2011, the […]

Music and Copyright: How the Supreme Court Struck the Right Note in Robinson (Even if its Timing was a Little Off!)

In the recent case of Cinar Corporation v Robinson, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the scope of copyright in a children’s television show. The defendants’ show, Robinson Sucroë, was, frankly, so similar in its essential elements to that developed by plaintiff Claude Robinson that few people, if any, were surprised by the Court’s finding […]

The Future of Copyright in a Global Context

This past March, Toronto hosted the 55th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). This year’s ISA Annual Convention brought together over 5300 scholars, practitioners, and students to discuss “Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization”. As intellectual property-based industries become increasingly implicated in global economic, social, cultural, and political discussions, copyright issues are becoming more […]

UGC Exception: For the Love of Amateur and the Profit of Everyone Else

Creating YouTube videos incorporating copyright protected works is a commonplace, often amateur pursuit of today's tech-savvy cultural 'consumers' and no one is making money off of it, right?... Wrong!

Transplanting the Canadian UGC Exception to Hong Kong: Part 2

In Part I of this series of blog posts, I discussed a position paper I submitted to the Hong Kong government as part of its public consultation on the treatment of parody under the copyright regime. This post continues from where the previous post left off. It discusses a forthcoming article I contributed to the Symposium on User-Generated Content under Canadian Copyright Law, which […]

Transplanting the Canadian UGC Exception to Hong Kong: Part 1

In July 2013, the Hong Kong government conducted a public consultation on the treatment of parody under the copyright regime. Building on two earlier consultations on digital copyright reform in December 2006 and April 2008, this latest consultation identified three legislative options: (1) clarifying the threshold for criminal copyright infringement; (2) introducing a specific criminal […]

No Beer and No TV Makes Judge Levy $10M fine for Simpsons, Family Guy Streaming

Who controls the British Crown? Who keeps illegal streaming down? The Federal Court of Canada does! (May the pop-culture references commence.) The Federal Court of Canada made international news by handing down one of the harshest copyright sentences in its history, a fine of over $10M. The defendant is only 23 years old.