OTTAWA – More than two dozen organizations representing creators, innovators, educators, scholars, students and consumers are calling on the government to make copyright fair.
Specifically, the groups have asked Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore in an open letter to adopt a flexible approach to ‘fair dealing’ in order to “to better accommodate Canadians’ expressive and innovative values in a digital age”.
Fair dealing is a defense under copyright law that allows the use of copyright-protected content without permission of the copyright owner in certain circumstances. But not all fair dealings qualify under the defence as currently drafted.
“Right now, fair dealing only applies to five special purposes: private study, research, criticism, review and news summary”, said David Fewer, director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, in a statement. “The courts have interpreted these categories to exclude things like parody. This makes reliance on fair dealing a risky strategy for writers, filmmakers, news shows and other creators. It’s hard to see how outlawing things like parody could be consistent with freedom of expression.”
CIPPIC also said that the restrictive nature of these categories also makes it difficult for the law to keep up with new technologies, such as time shifting, which is not technically legal under the current copyright law.
Fewer said that fixing fair dealing is as simple as changing the nature of the categories of fair dealing listed in the current law from exclusive to illustrative.
“The law should state that ‘Fair dealing for purposes including private study, research, criticism, review and news summary does not infringe copyright’, he continued. “The change we seek is simple and equitable: if a dealing is fair, then it should be legal. After all, what’s fair is fair.”
Click here to read the group’s letter.
