Although there are many groups involved in copyright lobbying, at the heart of the strategy are two organizations — the Canadian Recording Industry Association and the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association. CRIA’s board is made up the four major music labels plus its director, while the CMPDA’s board is comprised of representatives of the Hollywood movie studios. Those same studios and music labels provide support for the International Intellectual Property Association, which influences Canadian copyright policy by supporting U.S. government copyright lobby efforts.

In addition to their active individual lobbying (described here), CRIA and CMPDA have provided financial support for three associations newly active on copyright lobbying — the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s IP Council, and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce (there are other funders including pharmaceutical companies and law firms). Those groups have issued virtually identical reports and in turn supported seemingly independent sources such as the Conference Board of Canada and paid polling efforts through Environics.

via Michael Geist — Unravelling the Canadian Copyright Policy Laundering Strategy.

Regardless of where you fall on the copyright debate, this is an important article, and one I recommend reading for useful background on classic “rent-seeking” behaviour by entrenched interests. Any fabricated or overly biased information reduces the chance we will make positive decisions that benefit society as a whole — which, at least in the British/American/Canadian tradition of IP, is a main point of copyright.

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• Copyright report ‘lacked sufficient balance’: Conf. Board (canada.com)
• Conference Board of Canada admits that its publicly funded, plagiarized, biased copyright “research” is junk (boingboing.net)
• Does Copyright Foster or Hinder Innovation? (inpropriapersona.com)
• Against Intellectual Monopoly (inpropriapersona.com)

Michael Geist explains the current status of business method patents in Canada where, so far, they have been firmly rejected — unlike in the United States:

Most people think of patents in terms of legal protection for new technological inventions. There is another form of patent, however. A business method patent is one awarded for a special technique for doing business such as improvements to a company’s accounting or sales department.

Business method patents have proven very controversial in the United States, which has been home to dozens of lawsuits over their validity. By contrast, Canada has tried to craft a balance that neither embraces nor completely rejects them. That policy may be changing, however, as the Canadian Patent Appeal Board recently denied an appeal by Amazon.com over a “one-click” ordering system patent with strong language that challenged the notion that business method patents are patentable under Canadian law.

via Michael Geist — Panel Strikes Blow Against Business Method Patents in Canada.

Although recent rulings in the U.S. have cast doubts on business method patents here, it is interesting to see their fate in a neighbouring country with a related — but quite distinct — legal system.

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Image via Wikipedia

“MUSIC PIRATES IN CANADA: American Publishers Say They Are Suffering by Copyright Violations There — Steps Taken for Redress”

While this sounds like a headline ripped from a newspaper of today, it actually comes from an 1897 article in the New York Times. Enterprising Canadians were selling the sheet music of popular songs via mail to Americans for 5 — 10 cents, undercutting the 20 — 50 cents charged by copyright owners:

“Canadian pirates” is what the music dealers call publishing houses across the line who are flooding this country, they say, with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. They use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music Publishers’ Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in the past twelve months.

Jake Brown of Glorious Noise, one of the blogs (along with Idolator, BestActEver and boing boing) to rediscover this intriguing article in the archives of the New York Times, notes:

According to this handy inflation calculator, “What cost $.40 in 1897 would cost $10.22 in 2008.” That’s kinda a lotta money for sheet music, isn’t it?

The United States has a long history of not respecting the intellectual property of those from other countries, but this is the the earliest example I’ve seen that illustrates the U.S. shift from copyright scofflaw (we refused to sign Berne for ages, for example, and for many years U.S. publishers would republish British novels without paying any royalties).

It also interestingly illustrates what I thought was a very early use of the term “pirate” to describe a copyright infringer. Apparently, though, this usage goes back much earlier than 1897, according to Ben Zimmer at the Visual Thesaurus:

From early on, the words pirate and piracy were extended to other types of pillaging. As part of an extended rant against derivative poets in his 1603 pamphlet The Wonderfull Yeare, Thomas Dekker calls upon the Muses to “banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme.” The metaphor of intellectual piracy took hold in early modern English, with plagiarizers and unauthorized copiers of manuscripts compared to robbers on the high seas. Illegally reproduced books came to be known as “pirate editions” by the eighteenth century, long before online file-sharing made the piracy of copyrighted material child’s play.

So, like many things, the current battle between distributors and owners is hardly new.

I would also like to note the benefits to historical research of free access to archives like those of the New York Times. Great stuff!

Related articles

• Lawrence Lessig Answers Your Questions on Copyright, Corruption, and Congress (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Should Online File Sharing be Strongly Prosecuted? (usnews.com)
• A Word on Copyright Misnomers (plagiarismtoday.com)
• Publishers warm to new technology (financialpost.com)

Instead of using the noble scroll, Origen decided to take advantage of the page structure of the humble codex. Dividing each of two facing pages into three columns each, he began placing six texts side by side to compare them word for word. This monumental undertaking ultimately required many codices and is known as the Hexapla.

Origen also introduced a form of critical reading that was rather uncommon in the 3^rd century. Until then, writing was little more than a way to externalize memory. Reading was really a way to help reciting. The reader read aloud and, so to speak, was inhabited by the text projected by his own voice. Critical reading, by contrast, seeks to scrutinize the text and engineers a psychological space, a sense of distance, where the reader has an opportunity to exert his critical faculties.

The description above reminds me of the critical tie that exists between paratext, text and readers, something I’ve been fascinated about for years (and a connection I would love to carry into an analysis of legal writings and texts).

He continues into the modern world of academic publishing:

This very first phase in the transition to the digital world reminds us that in any communication system, it is important to look at who can produce documents, who can preserve them, who can organize them in order to facilitate retrieval, who has access, and what can be done with the accessed document. A number of rules long organized around copyright laws were suddenly superseded by licensing rules that are contractual in nature. Also, 10 years ago, the art of contracting licences was quite esoteric among librarians. Meanwhile, we academics were going on with our usual business, largely impervious to the sea change that was taking place under our noses. As authors, academics act largely like peacocks and want to be featured in the “best” journals, whatever the cost to the library; as readers, academics want access to everything and if it is not available, they view it either as the fault of the librarians or as the responsibility of the university administrators. Again, as readers, academics simply do not see publishers and pricing issues. The same is almost as true of academics as authors: how many know the publisher of a coveted journal title?

And a problem that those in libraries — especially anyone working on a budget in a library — knows all too well:

Very few firms dominate academic publishing, and they extract profits that can reach and even exceed 40 per cent before taxes. Let us remember that we are talking about research articles made possible by large amounts of public money supporting research and universities. They are given away by their authors when they sign their rights away. These articles are peer reviewed for free by other researchers. The result is then sold to libraries, often supported by public money.

Then he moves on to open access, a topic dear to my heart, and describes some of the recent moves towards open access (or, in terms of the NIH, what I prefer to call “public access,” since much of the freedom associated with open access is removed, leaving mostly — but arguably most critically and importantly — the freedom to read a work without paying an exorbitant fee):

For open access, the most essential step emerged when funding agencies began to realize that it was to everybody’s benefit, including their own, to have open access to the literature they funded. The Wellcome trust in the UK, was a leader in this regard, but some American and European institutions followed quickly. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States became a battle ground between publishers and open access supporters. Ultimately, open access won despite the deep pockets and lobbying efforts of the publishers. In December 2007, the large omnibus law signed by President Bush contained a provision stating that all research papers financed by NIH had to be deposited in NIH’s repository at most 12 months after publication. Other funding institutes began to follow suit, notably Canadian Institutes of Health Research in Canada.

(For more, see also the Taking the Long View: Guedon and Changing Technologies at Slaw.ca.)

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Barry Davies has ruled that Section 184.4 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which allows law enforcement officers to electronically intercept private communications in ‘exceptional circumstances’ without court authorization, is unconstitutional because it violates ‘the fundamental freedom to be free from unreasonable search and seizure’ protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Davies’ ruling, made public Monday, can be appealed to the province’s Court of Appeal. Section 184.4 allows police to intercept communications without a judge’s approval in certain emergency situations, but Davies said that the provision violates the rights of people whose communications have been intercepted.

Interesting. I didn’t see this until today.

Update: Note that in July of 2008, after the above ruling, an Ontario judge ruled the same wiretap statute listed above was constitutional. See Ontario judge gives nod to unapproved wiretaps from the Toronto Star. Thus, the legal status of the law in Canada is still unsettled on this area of law as of July 2008.

The interface is refreshingly simple, and makes excellent use of AJAX-style coding to switch between French and English, for example, as well as to provide quick access to the “Reflex Record,” which shows “noteup and cited decisions.” This is rather like Sheperdizing in the U.S., combined with a useful list of citations found within the case. Decisions are available both in PDF and HTML formats, and in both French and English (it’s rather fun to read cases en français). Searching is based on a streamlined interface that feels quite different than the clunky Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis search screens.

CanLII also offers RSS feeds of Canadian courts and tribunals, so you can keep up on the latest decisions. (Also free.) Nice! It could be made even better if there was a mechanism for accessing RSS feeds by topic as well as jurisdiction, but that’s a minor quibble.

Overall, as a U.S. law student looking into Canadian law for the first time, I’m impressed!

Some articles:

• AOL Adds Location Capability for IM
• Residential Wi-Fi Mapping Database Revealed

And here’s the company (Skyhook):

• http://www.skyhookwireless.com/