Ottawa Citizen: …Tories face the music for using song

Ottawa Citizen: Copyright tough guys, Tories face the music for using song
Party in hot water after using tune in video without permission
Glen McGregor, with files from Andrew Potter,

As the Harper government prepares to introduce tougher new copyright rules, the Conservative party is being accused of using the theme song from the reality TV show The Apprentice without permission of the record company that owns it.
At a press conference on Sunday, the Conservatives presented an election-style attack video about the alleged costs of Stéphane Dion’s spending promises, set to the musical refrain of “money, money, money, money, mo-ney.”
The video was presented to support the Tories’ claim that the Liberal leader would run up $62.5 billion in new debt if elected. It splices together video clips of Mr. Dion citing financial figures, accompanied by a segment of the 1974 hit song, For the Love of Money.

The press conference was led by Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who is also responsible for overseeing reforms intended to strengthen Canada’s copyright laws. Copies of the video were broadcast by media organizations on national television, but have not been broadcast by the Tories.

Laura Murray: A Cooperative Future for Access Copyright?

Laura Murray: A Cooperative Future for Access Copyright?

Martin Friedland’s report on the way Access Copyright divvies up the money it collects from educational institutions and other licensees was truly shocking to me. I’ve been a critic of Access Copyright for quite some time, but I always figured (hoped?) the main problem was transparency: mechanisms and principles for allotting revenues were not made public, and that bothered me as a matter of principle. Well, it turns out that the people inside Access Copyright haven’t known what’s going on either. Friedland reveals a stunning array of out-of-date formulas, nonexistent formulas, unfair formulas, and money handed out to publishers with no mechanisms to ensure that it be forwarded to creators. For example, Friedland notes that

some publishers do not pass on to unaffiliated authors the author’s share of reprography royalties that the publisher receives from Access Copyright. Included in this category is one very major newspaper which takes the position that as it does not acquire authors’ reprographic rights under its contracts, none of the income that it receives from Access Copyright can be for authors. The company maintains that it is up to the authors to join Access Copyright and claim it themselves.

Los Angeles Times: Copyright this

Los Angeles Times: Copyright this

Intellectual property’s social value may trump copyright law
Dallas Weaver

Jon Healey correctly points out that the debate over intellectual-property theft is complex because we are often dealing with “non-real properties.” These properties cost nearly nothing to produce, and an infinite number of people can use the same property at the same time. And yet, we still want to treat them as if they were “real” property.

Significantly, some of these non-real properties have major effects on human welfare. Take, for example, the formula for “oral rehydration therapy,” a mixture of salt, sugar and water. Although it could potentially be copyrighted, it has saved more lives in the Third World than almost anything else. The world is lucky that this formula is in the public dom

Howard Knopf: Minutes of the Heritiage Committee…

Howard Knopf: Minutes of the Heritiage Committee re Proposed Special Joint Committee

The Minutes of the Heritage Committee meeting in which the Committee indicated its desire to get involved in the proposed copyright bill and to have it referred before second reading reveal some interesting remarks by the Hon.Hedy Fry, whose motion led to the Report:

I think we have heard repeatedly on this committee that one of the greatest challenges to copyright is the advent of digital media, and that this in fact seems totally insurmountable and uncontrollable because people are downloading intellectual property of creators and artists on iPods and everything they can. That has left us with a huge copyright vacuum.

National Post: Protect creators, respect consumers

National Post: Protect creators, respect consumers

Nowhere, it is safe to say, has the rapid advance of network technology created more paradoxes and headaches for lawmakers than in the field of intellectual property. The theoretical foundations of copyrights and patents were pretty well established by the end of the 18th century — well enough that no one has been able to improve on the statement of their purpose found in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” By the end of the 19th century there was an effective international system in place to extend this guarantee throughout the civilized world. Relatively little tinkering was called for.

But now we are digital: the ordinary citizen is armed with peer-to-peer media sharing software, powerful encryption and compact information storage. That has made it much more difficult to protect and reinterpret the rights of creators while respecting the privacy of the citizen and his established rights to fair use of copyrighted material, which are part of the historic bargain. It’s a zero-sum game between makers and users, one which has been made more vicious by controversial government extensions of the “limited Times” during which works remain outside the public domain. The latest democratic legislator to find himself trapped between media companies and the “copy-left” movement is our Industry Minister, Jim Prentice.

Ottawa Citizen: Corporate giants form alliance…

Ottawa Citizen: Corporate giants form alliance for copyright compromise
Michael Geist

Under most circumstances, Telus and Rogers Communications fiercely compete in the marketplace. The same can be said for Google and Yahoo, the world’s two leading rival Internet search companies. Yet last week, these companies joined forces with a who’s who of the telecom, Internet, retail, and broadcast communities in a single cause — the call for fair and balanced copyright reform.
Following months of Industry Minister Jim Prentice citing business demands as a critical factor behind his commitment to copyright reform, a powerhouse group of companies and business associations formed the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright (BCBC) to speak for themselves.
The coalition, which also includes the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, the Canadian Wireless and Telecommunications Association, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and the Retail Council of Canada, publicly released a seven-point plan for balanced copyright reform that responds to business concerns that “the government would err too much on the side of the copyright holders.”

Los Angeles Times: File ‘sharing’ or ‘stealing’?

Los Angeles Times: File ‘sharing’ or ‘stealing’?
The semantic debate over whether copyright infringement is theft.
Jon Healey

A few days ago I came across an Op-Ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate party — a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft. Here’s an excerpt:

In “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism”, the economist and Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek explains the difference between conventional property rights and copyright. While the supply of material resources is limited by nature, the supply of an immaterial good [is] unlimited, unless the government limits the supply by law…. A later Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, describes copyright as a monopoly that decreases supply to a level below the optimal level. Copyright and the regulations that follow from it should, according to Friedman, be described primarily as a limitation of free speech.

Michael Geist: Independent Report Blasts Access Copyright …

Michael Geist: Independent Report Blasts Access Copyright Over Lack of Transparency

One year after it was completed by University of Toronto law professor Martin L. Friedland, the results on an independent study on Access Copyright and royalty distribution system has been released [the report was emailed to me; I have not seen an online version]. The report is a stunning indictment of the copyright collective, calling for dramatic change in governance, transparency, and royalty distribution practices. Friedland begins by noting:

I have undertaken a number of other public policy studies over the years, including such reasonably complex topics as pension reform, securities regulation, and national security, and have never encountered anything quite as complex as the Access Copyright distribution system. It is far from transparent. Very little is written down in a consolidated, cohesive, comprehensive, or comprehensible manner. There is no manual describing in detail how the distribution system operates.

The report continues by examining the history of Access Copyright, comparing it to other collectives, and identifying inequities in the distribution structure. For example, it reveals that “in the distribution for 2005 under the federal government licence, the publishers received $188,256 for scholarly journals and the creators received nothing.”

CBC: Business coalition opposes harsh copyright reform

CBC: Business coalition opposes harsh copyright reform
Google, Rogers, Retail Council among those urging changes to legislation

A who’s who of powerful companies and business associations have banded together to push for less restrictive copyright reform, driving a stake into the heart of the federal government’s argument for its new copyright bill.

The Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, a group that includes Google, Yahoo, Rogers, Telus, the Canadian Alliance of Broadcasters and the Retail Council of Canada, among others, on Tuesday sent its stance on seven key copyright principles to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner and several other cabinet ministers.

William Patry: No One Likes a Bully: The IIPA and Canada

William Patry: No One Likes a Bully: The IIPA and Canada

Despite the use of the word “International” in its name, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is an umbrella group comprised of 7 U.S. trade associations: the Association of American Publishers, Business Software Alliance, Entertainment Software Association (video game industry), The Independent Film & Television Alliance, The Motion Picture Association of America, National Music Publishers’ Association, and Recording Industry Association of America; it pursues a purely U.S. corporate copyright agenda

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