 Well, I think we'll get things started this evening. Thank you very much for coming today to the last lecture of the spring 2011 term in the Dalhous University Schuler School of Law Public Lecture Series. It's great to see so many people excited and interested about copyright law. My name is Graham Reynolds. I'm an assistant prof here at the law school. And I teach and research in the areas of copyright law, intellectual property law, and property law. So today what I'm going to do is just give an introduction generally to copyright law. Until recently, copyright was an area of the law that was only of interest to a very narrow subset of lawyers, lobbyists, and academics. Increasingly, however, many individuals are seeing how copyright impacts our lives on a daily or near daily basis and how copyright laws can help shape tomorrow's technologies and tomorrow's culture. So again, today I'll give an intro to copyright law. I'll outline some copyright basics and we'll discuss several copyright myths. So a few of the issues that I'll focus on will be what is copyright? Why, in my opinion, does copyright matter? Are there any defenses to copyright infringement? Do I have a right to copy for personal use? What are digital locks? And how do they relate to copyrights? What was proposed in Bill C-32, the latest attempt to amend Canada's copyright law? And what impact would this have had on the rights of copyright? Owners, users, Canadian culture, and freedom of expression more generally. So I'm planning on speaking until around seven or so and then taking questions. But having said this, if you have any questions over the course of the next hour, please feel free to ask at any point. I'll also ask sort of at several points for the next hour for your input on certain questions. Hopefully this can be an interactive experience as well as just sort of me imparting some information. Now, one disclaimer before I start, nothing that I say here today should be interpreted as legal advice. If you do have specific questions on particular copyright issues, I recommend discussing those with a lawyer. What I wanna do today is just basically give information on copyright and have a broad discussion on copyright issues and myths. So first, copyright basics. In Canada, as well as in many countries around the world, laws have been passed that grant creators a bundle of rights in the works that they create. And this bundle of rights is called copyright. So copyright or the idea that one can own exclusive rights in expression is a relatively recent creation. And in fact, it emerged with the development of one specific technology. Any idea of what that technology might have been? Great, right, they're printing press. So before the printing press came along, it was quite hard and time consuming to make multiple copies of books. And the way the books were produced had a direct impact on the way the books could be sold. So essentially on commission, a customer would go to a printer, referred then as a stationer, and would order a book. The stationer would then create this book according to the customer's tastes and preferences. The printing press, though, made it easier to print multiple copies of books. And this had the result of changing the business models of many publishers. So publishers or stationers then created multiple copies of books which were sold throughout time, as opposed to creating one book sold to a particular customer. Now one problem with this new system was that publishers could print the same book, multiple copies of the same book, and then undercut each other in terms of price. So pressure then began to build for the development of some sort of system to regulate the business of book publishing. And essentially, book publishers wanted an artificial monopoly. They wanted to guarantee that they would be the only party who would be entitled to print a specific work. And only in that case would they be sure that the investment they put into printing the book could be recouped from the sale of the book later on. Now initially, publishers petitioned governments for these monopolies, and petitioned successfully in many cases. And later they made an agreement amongst themselves in the context of a group of publishers or stationers called the Stationers Company. So they agreed that no other member of the Stationers Company, which was composed largely of members, publishers in the London area could publish the same title. But this system had limitations. Can anyone think of what limitations this system might have had? Right, exactly. So it only applies to this closed group. The agreement was only valid between members of the Stationers Company. So people who weren't members of this company weren't prevented by the internal rules of the company from publishing works. And the actions of these so-called rogue publishers, rogue from the perspective of the Stationers Company, including many publishers from Scotland, frustrated the Stationers Company and led to calls for additional public protection for the publishing industry. And some of these early calls were rejected. But they were later sort of heard by the government of England after the government recognized that the Stationers Company could help enforce its censorship laws that it brought in due to religious tension in the 1530s. Now after a period of time, due to various reasons, including the high prices of books, concerns about the supply of books, and the lapse of the censorship legislation, the early control held by the Stationers Company was broken. The pressure for continued protection led to what we see as the first copyright act that was not connected to censorship, which was called, in its long form, an act for the encouragement of learning by vesting the copies of printed books in the authors or purchasers of such copies during the times therein mentioned. And for the rest of the talk I'll refer to this as the Statute of Anne. And the statue was enacted in 1709 and came into force in 1710. So that's a little bit of a history of copyright in a nutshell, but it's quite relevant today because we can trace Canada's Copyright Act directly back to the Statute of Anne. And some of the pressures that were involved in terms of how the act came about are still present today. So now that we've got a bit of history, let's look at what Katie and Copyright Law actually looks like. Before we do so though, any questions or comments up to this point? Well we see in many other countries, it wasn't applicable beyond England, so it was only applicable in England itself or in the UK. But many other countries had early struggles as well in terms of how to deal with publishing, how to ensure the development of a local publishing industry. Many other countries had censorship concerns as well. So we see similar types of developments occurring in other countries, differing, you know, greatly depending on context, but a roughly similar sort of halting development of the walk towards copyright legislation. I'm actually at one good point that I should mention. So copyright legislation is essentially national, so countries originally before their international treaties could do whatever they wanted with respect to copyright. So you had some countries that generally had a strong publishing industry, would have strong copyright laws. Other countries that didn't have initially a strong corporate industry would have weak copyright laws, at least with respect to foreign individuals in their books, so as to build up the local publishing industry. The United States is a good example of this type of country. We're very early on that the copyright protection for books from the UK for instance was weak to non-existent. And then later when United States publishing industry developed, those laws became stronger. What we see today though is although countries are still able to create their own copyright laws, this is occurring in a web of international treaties. So countries are constrained in terms of what they can do. So we can pass copyright laws, but they have to comply with certain treaties that we've also agreed to. So copyright is national. It applies just in the country to which it's, you know, that has passed that legislation, but it occurs in an international web. Okay, so let's look at Katie and copyright law today. Now copyright's said to be a creature of statute. So that is to say aside from a few issues, the rights and responsibilities of copyright users, owners, and other parties are set out exhaustively in the Copyright Act. So if you wanna know what Canada's copyright laws are, the best place to go to is initially the Copyright Act, and then to look to what are the cases that have interpreted those provisions. So I said earlier, a copyright is a bundle of rights owned by the copyright owner in a certain work. Does anybody have any suggestions of what some of these rights might be, or what some of these sticks might be in this bundle? Well, let's say if we look at profits in the sense of the right to make a copy and then sell that copy, the right to reproduce the work is definitely one stick in the bundle of rights, but it certainly isn't the only rights that copyright owners have. They also have the right to perform the work in public, the right to communicate the work to the public by telecommunication, the right to publish any translation of the work, the right to convert a dramatic work into a novel or other non-dramatic work, the right to convert an artistic work into a performance in public, and the list just goes on. So in terms of this bundle of rights, we can imagine there are many sticks in this bundle of property rights that the copyright owner requires. So in terms of, if I can ask you to play the role of a judge for one minute, how would you interpret the right to reproduce a work or a substantial part of a work? What do you think this right should include? Or when should we say that someone has infringed the right to reproduce a work or a substantial part? Great, so in those instances where someone's not the owner and they reproduce a portion of the work, then we can say they've reproduced a substantial part of a work. Well, in terms of how substantial is defined, that could be another question. You know, what do you think substantial might mean? Or if you were a judge, how would you define substantial? If we had, let's say, a 300-page book, how would you determine what a substantial taking from that book might be for the purpose of copyright infringement? Okay, great. We can look at how much of the work is taken. Should we look at anything else as well? Okay, sure, yeah. So one thing we can look at was, you know, could the book stand on its own if that amount was taken? Or would the amount that was taken, is that, you know, I think what you might get is, is it sufficiently important to the book itself? And that's where the two-prong test the courts will look at when they're looking at substantial. How much of the work was taken and how important was the part that was taken? How important is that to the work that was allegedly infringed? So one example, if we look at a song, for instance, if you take the hook from a song, so sometimes three or four bars, it's the core of the song. Some have said that it's the most profitable element of a pop song, for instance. Can be very short in a three-minute song could be 12 seconds, for instance. If someone takes that and reproduces that in a different work, that's enough to be a substantial taking on the, you know, through the interpretation of Canada's copyright laws. Now in the U.S., one case is said that if you take a single note, that's enough to constitute a reproduction of the work. We haven't gone to that part yet. Based on some analysis that I've done of Canadian case law, it looks like if you can recognize the song in a new song, that would be seen as a substantial part. Okay, so the right to reproduce a work, it's infringed if you reproduce the entire work or a substantial part of the work, which is defined by looking at the quality of the taking or how important it was or the quantity or how much you took. What about the right to perform the work in public? Again, play the role of a judge. How do you think that this right should be defined? So when should someone be seen as performing a work in public? How about one example? Let's say it's a charity event that doesn't charge admission and that doesn't admit the general public. Should this be seen as a performance in public? Okay, so if we look at, you know, how big was the group? How many people were there and we could define public in that way? So public is 10 or more, private is under 10. That's certainly one way that judges could like it. Look at it. Well, public is anything out in the open. So if it's open without concealment to the knowledge of all, we can see that that potentially being public, which would mean that any closed door performance could potentially not be a public performance. One way that courts have looked at it is, you know, we need to look at the audience. And if the audience could be set as being part of the corporate owner's public, so someone who would be interested in paying for that sort of event, have they not gone with the not receiving compensation, then that will be seen as a performance in public. One thing that wouldn't be seen or that hasn't been seen in the past as being a performance in public has been just a general, you know, a play breaks out at a house, for instance, or a small house party or, you know, children putting on a play for a family. Courts have said that this isn't public. So in terms of what actually is public, we don't know definitively. What we do know is that a small house party where a play is ancillary or something just breaks out that wouldn't be seen as public. But beyond that, courts have struggled with these issues. And one of the reasons they've struggled with it is because the idea that we should reward corporate owners for the work that they've put in to either creating if they're the actual creator or author or the risk they're taking in distributing the work. And we wanna create that reward and if we don't have that reward or that incentive, then people won't create works in the future. But I think that there's a definitely attention as you go in terms of what should individuals be able to do without having to compensate a corporate owner and in what certain circumstances should the corporate owner have to be compensated. So we've looked through two of the rights. Now the right to communicate the work to the public by telecommunication, we can see that as being pushing content out through a television, pushing content out over a radio, but the internet brings another issue as well. So the internet is also seen as a situation where you can communicate a work to the public by telecommunication. But one issue there could be, what are the steps that are required? When are you actually communicating a work to the public by telecommunication online? Do you think it's when you initially upload the work or does something else actually have to happen as well? And what courts have found in this instance is that the act of making available a work online or the act of uploading content to the internet is only half of the action for communicating a work to the public by telecommunication. The other half is when somebody pulls that content. So if you upload something that's, you're on the way to communicating to the public by telecommunication, but you're not fully there yet and the rights not infringed until someone else pulls that content down. But as we've seen so far, there's definitely disagreement about what, how broadly or narrowly should these rights be interpreted? Or how much power should we give to corporate owners? How much ability should we give to individuals or to users to use works or to engage with content without having to compensate someone? Now in terms of what corporate infringement is, in section 27 of the Copyright Act, this section says essentially that just anytime anyone does any of the things with your expression, without your permission, that you have the exclusive right to do that they're infringing your copyright. So the bundle of rights that we've seen before, anytime anyone does anything that you have the right to do without your permission, on the face of it, they're infringing your copyright. Any other questions up to this point? Definitely, yeah, yeah. And one of the, one that we'll talk about sort of one of the copyright basics is that, the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in all but a few circumstances. If the author is creating the work in the course of employment and is an employee, then the employer gets the copyright. But generally, if I just sit at home and I write a novel, I'll be the person who owns the first copyright. The copyright can be assigned. So if I want, then I can assign my copyright to a publisher, which I might be required to do if I'm trying to publish a work. If I write a song, I might have to assign it to a label if I want to get my record produced. In order to make that assignment valid, it has to be in writing and it has to be signed. But certainly, there's a recognition that, although an author is the first owner of copyright, they're not necessarily the only individual or the individual who can profit from who has the necessary capital to be able to bring that work to the public. So, and it's interesting as well. If you look back to the Statute of Anne in 1709, it's called, authors are in the title, but publishers are behind the author. So one of the, a large section of the commentary about the Statute of Anne is that we see publishers trying to continue to protect their interests and their rights, but they're doing so by holding out the author. That this is really about the author's interest. And certainly, there were authors as well who were quite concerned about being able to have some say and some ability to profit from and to control those rights. But a lot of instances, again, it is tied into, just as it was before the Copyright Act came into play, the interests of publishers and those who can provide the capital investment to move things forward. Yep? In terms of offering something, do you have to assert your copyright ownership to it? Like if I just write something on a piece of paper. Yeah. Is copyright implied just because I've written it and it's on a piece of paper? Well, we'll look at it a minute or so in terms of whether, you know, what a literary work is and whether just writing anything down constitutes literary work. But in terms of registration requirement, you don't have to do anything to register your copyright. So the second that you take your pen from paper, the second that you finish, you know, you save something on a computer screen, for instance, you have copyright in that work. Now it used to be the case in the US that you actually did have to go through a process of registration in order to get copyright. It was sort of a necessary step in order to have this bundle of rights. But not so anymore in the US and definitely not so in Canada. You don't have to do anything aside from finish, you know, from, you know, taking your pen away from paper to have copyright in the work, provided those other criteria are satisfied. Yep? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yeah. Right. What about the download? Well, I'll open it up to the group. So someone who downloads the work from the internet, we won't talk about defenses, but just on what we've talked about so far, are there any rights that you can see that might have been infringed in downloading something from the internet? Well, I think, you know, if we connect the act of downloading to making a copy, so if by downloading something, you're making a copy onto your computer, the copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce the work. In downloading something, you're making a copy, you're reproducing the work, so you're on the face of it infringing the copyright owner's rights. Well, look at some defenses in terms of whether you might have a defense to that act of downloading a work, but in the context of the internet, then the act of a user or someone pulling the content down or downloading it would both complete the act of infringing the right to communicate the work to the public by telecommunication, and also be a separate, you know, unless there's a defense, separate act of infringement of reproducing the work itself. No, that's a great question. Well, when you find a book and you take it home, you're not making a copy of it at all, so no extra copy is being created. Probably the best example I can say is for a collage situation. If you make a collage out of, it takes six or seven, let's say, books, pieces of art, anything else, you cut pieces out, put them onto a collage, you have a new collage, but nothing was reproduced. You took one copy initially, and you end up with one copy. If you do it in an online context, you cut and paste something, and you start with that one digital copy, and you end with the second copy. And that's one of the reasons why the internet has had such a, why copyright is now such an important issue because the internet, because essentially with everything you're doing, you are making a copy. You're making a temporary copy or a very, very brief copy. But as a result, that's allowing copyright law to get a grip on that situation. Whereas other actions, sharing a book, giving a book to a friend, making a collage out of something, taking a book out of the library, tearing something out of a newspaper, and passing it along to someone else, you're not making a copy in any of those activities. So it's the act itself of just creating that temporary copy that would allow copyright law to become involved. Well, the question is just then, has a reproduction been made? And if it has, then copyright law can get involved. So if it has in terms of a streaming activity, then those cases are starting to come before the courts. But the question there will be, who's committing an infringing act and which party can potentially be sued? Is it the internet service provider that's allowing that feed to come through? Is it the person who initiates it? Is it the person who receives it? So it's an interesting area. I saw a few more hands up, yep. Yeah, no, that's a great question. The idea of a derivative work is, you take something and you make something and you make something new. The only thing we'll look at in copyright law generally is, did you take a substantial part of a work and use it to make a new work? And if in that new work, there is still a substantial part of the original work, then you've on the face, fit and fringe to copyright. So if you want to make a Mickey Mouse parody, for instance, and you take Mickey Mouse and you put them in a different situation, the question is just not, did you create a new work or does your work have social value or is your work important or is it critical? Those will definitely come to play in terms of our analysis of defenses to copyright infringement. But initially in terms of just, was a right infringed? Did you take a substantial part of the work? If so, you reproduce the work and on the face of it, you can be held liable for copyright infringement. Yep. Yeah, I think it even goes beyond implied consent. I think they're just giving you a license. So again, you're infringing copyright when you do one of the things that are in the bundle of sticks to the copyright owner without their authorization. But if they're putting up songs on their websites and inviting downloads, and certainly they're giving you a license to make a copy of that work, likely for the limited purpose of just being able to download it and then listen to it later. But I think that, and that license might be there as well with works that you find on peer-to-peer file sharing services, but it's much more difficult to actually find out whether there is that risk of being held liable for copyright infringement. Why are we interested? Good question. I think that publishers definitely serve a role with respect to the public interest in that if it weren't for publishers, a lot of works would not be disseminated as broadly as they are right now. So I think in terms of, do publishers have too many rights to copyright owners have too many rights? This is certainly a question that can be debated. But in terms of publishers serving a vital role of taking content and disseminating it to a larger group than would otherwise be able to access that book, there's a public interest and there's a freedom of expression value in that. Certainly the internet has posed a challenge to a lot of traditional publishers in terms of their business models, being able to, if content can be disseminated by creators to a wide range of people without having to rely on an intermediary, then that might be something that changes business models in the future. But I think in terms of the ability to disseminate content to a wider group, is there's significant value in that. But you just took an intro very closely, but in the case of Samuels, we have an offer here. Now let's ignore the fact that there are payments to the author. Yeah. It's possible to pay the author directly. Why do we care? The book publisher has produced 100 copies or 1,000 copies or whatever. He sells them. Why do we care if there's anymore published by somebody else? In terms of why do we care if a second publisher publishes the same books? I think the question is then, would that first publisher have actually published those books if they didn't have the guarantee that they'd be the one person who could publish it? If they knew that someone could publish an edition of that book for a third of the price, that people would only buy that second cheaper edition and the investment that they put into the first set of books would be lost. The question could be... Why don't they... Let's say we'd like photocopied books because they're cheap. Why doesn't the publisher pay realizing that there's a market for cheap books to make photocopied copies available? We'd have a choice. We could buy the 5-cent page once. We could buy the hardbound copies. There are options now. Yeah. I'm not like, if there's a market and if something serves, why can't somebody else serve it? Yeah. And I think these questions are all legitimate ones in terms of questioning, why do we need to have these property rights? And there are questions that have been raised really ever since the 1700s and even before with the stationers company. Why do we need to have this protected wall around expression? Certainly we see certain types of price discrimination right now in terms of an edition comes out first in a hardcover. People wait for a while, then it comes out in a softcover. So we see certain limited types of price discrimination, not to the point of publishers putting out photocopied copies of books. But certainly I think that's something that we might see a little bit later. But these are all questions that really do and really have been asked for hundreds of years. What role did do intermediaries play? And why should we be giving intermediaries exclusive rights in content? Which means essentially that other individuals can't do anything that would fall both in the scope of those rights. There's a few more copyright basics that I wanna go through as we're moving on. First one, you can't have copyright in facts or information. So if it's just a fact or a piece of information, it's not protectable by copyright. But you can get copyright in the way that you arrange or express that fact with information. Now in terms of whether copyright should be extended to cover facts or information, certain jurisdictions have taken that step. Australia, for instance, information can be protected by copyright itself. But I think there are some potential freedom of expression issues. On the flip side though, people do work hard to discover facts or to create information. So we might want to reward or encourage that creation. And also information is socially valuable. I think that can go to both sides. If it's socially valuable, we should allow everyone to use it. If it's socially valuable, we should try to encourage this creation. So some of these same debates are going on. As well, you can't have copyright in ideas. So the idea of making a painting of a hockey player who's skating down Spring Garden Road, no copyright in that idea. Anyone in the room can go make the same painting should you wish. But if I actually make that painting and then someone copies that exact same expression, then I can have copyright or can have property rights in my version of that idea. Now, there are also a few criteria that do have to be satisfied before you can be granted a property right in your expression. The first is a residency requirement, which is quite easy to establish. So I mentioned before that copyright is national. So Canada has copyright laws. The US has copyright laws. Countries around the world will have them. And generally, it used to be the case that you could do whatever you want. You could develop your copyright laws as you wished. But now we have international treaties that impose minimum standards of protection. So our laws are restrained in terms of what we actually can do. So essentially, for this residency requirement, you just have to have when you made the work, be a citizen or subject of or a person ordinarily resident in a treaty country, which is defined in any country that's a member of the Berne Convention of the Universal Copyright Convention or the World Trade Organization. So the second that anyone creates to work in any of those countries, protection springs up in Canada. The second requirement is your expression has to be fixed. So you can imagine paint has to be on canvas. You have to be typing on a computer. Once you save, for instance, or writing on paper. So this isn't a criteria that's required by the Copyright Act, instead it's one that has been imposed by judges. So do you think that this criteria, that a work has to be fixed in order to receive copyright protection, is a good idea? Well, actually it's interesting with lectures. So if anyone who's sort of speaking off the cuff and someone who takes notes based on that, the person who takes the notes who writes it down, that's the person who has copyright protection. My lecture is quite tightly scripted. So based on that, I could argue that if anybody copied it down it would be a reproduction based on the notes that I have. So if the closer that one stays to one's detailed notes, I would have copyright protection in what I'm doing. But if someone who speaks off the cuff in that situation, anybody who writes it down has copyright in that. We see that emerge in a lot of cases involving politicians and journalists who take down the speeches of politicians. Those journalists who take that down actually are the ones who have copyright in those speeches. Yep. Improv is quite interesting because improv is something that I think is not fixed as well. And that's one of the issues, I think, with the fixation requirement. Where, I mean, one of the reasons why the fixation requirement is in place, I think, is that it's really important when you go before a court and allege that someone has infringed your copyright when you're asked, okay, well, what, in what was your copyright infringed? To be able to say, okay, well, here's the book and you can compare it. With the work that's not fixed, it can be much more difficult to actually do that. So for an improv night, if an evening is filmed, for instance, and someone reproduces a copy of the work, you can argue at that point that there was some sort of reproduction of a fixed work. Another, but likely the videographer would be an employee who, you know, and they would be creating the work in the course of employment, or a contract could be signed where they waive any rights to copyright or copyright goes to the group itself. So there are ways to engage with those issues and to ensure that you can try to keep that copyright within your group. One famous Australian example is a moving sand sculptor had their work, someone else essentially created the same moving sand sculptor, or one that was substantially similar, but there was no recourse in copyright law because the work wasn't fixed in itself. So I think it's an issue in terms of whether this fixation requirement should be there or whether it's just something that should be, you know, a good idea when you're going before a court. The other requirement is that, or one of the requirements, the work actually has to be original. So how do you think that we should define original? So in order to be protected by copyright, a work has to be original. What do you think that should mean? Okay, so it's a new work. It hasn't been created before, has this element of novelty. Any other suggestions? Okay, so some sort of connection to the individual or to authenticity itself. Now the approach the UK has taken is that it's referred to as the sweat of the brow approach. So which is essentially, you know, if it originates from the author, if it's more than a mere copy, that's enough to satisfy this originality requirement. In the US, they want to impose some sort of creativity standard to what originality means. But they don't want to make the standard too high to make it too difficult to acquire copyright. So what the standard is set in the US is that you have to have a spark or a modicum of creativity. In terms of what that means, it, yeah, it's, yeah, exactly. So what does it mean to have a spark of creativity? Well, it's something, it's, you know, more than a phone book, which is the case that established that. But how much more it'll be a case-by-case determination. In Canada, again, it's slightly different. It's potentially between these two standards. But it said as, you know, it's original if it originates from the author, if it's more than a mere copy, and if it's the product of an exercise of skill and judgment that's more than mechanical. In terms of what this means, well, we have it applied in one case, and it's the case where this statement came out of, if you create head notes based on a court decision. So you summarize the decision in a paragraph or so, that will be seen as original. That's an exercise of skill and judgment that's more than mechanical. Summing if you just change the font, if you add page numbers, again, the court said, well, that's not original. That's not an exercise of skill and judgment that's more than mechanical. So you have to satisfy this originality requirement, which may not be a very high threshold. You also have to establish that your work is a literary, artistic, dramatic, or musical work. And we also have rights like sound recording rights, but I think I'll just focus on those types of works for now. So one question I wanna ask, how should courts define a literary work? So in order to be protected, if it's sort of in the literary context, your work is original, it's your residence requirement is satisfied. What should we say is a definition of a literary work? Any suggestions? Should we just high culture? Just a novel, or should we impose a length requirement? Okay. I think it's a bit more of a sentence. Okay. I don't think you can. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So length should have somebody to do with it. So we'll bring the length requirement along. Any other suggestions? Genre. Genre, okay. So for literary work, we should have some sort of determination of this aesthetic requirement, what genre it might be. Did anyone write a grocery list today? Well, you have copyright in that grocery list because the literary work, the way that courts have defined it is, it's just anything that's expressed in printer writing. The courts have decided that that should be the appropriate definition for literary work. Now there are pros and cons to this determination. The pros are judges don't have to engage in the question of what is literary, of what has aesthetic value. The con is that that means that most things that are actually written down are subject to copyright protection for the entire term of protection and for all of the bundle of rights. So if someone performs their grocery list in public, you have a potential claim. Yes. Yeah, software is definitely included. Yeah. No. So yeah, it's just anything expressed in print or writing and that's been interpreted to include software as well. And even the act has been amended to kind of to clarify that computer software is seen as a literary work. Yeah. Yeah. I think what you have to, what the argument would be, you'd have to argue that you abandoned your copyright in addition to abandoning the list itself. What the counter argument could be was that you just tore up the list in the same way that if somebody tears up a copy of a book, they're not tearing up their copyright itself. I guess what I'm getting. Yeah. No, that's a great question. I mean, just generally in the law, what is seen for abandonment, if you want to abandon property, for instance, you need an intention to abandon and sufficient acts of abandonment. So you need to, when you're walking past a garbage can, deliberately throw something out as opposed to walking through the forest and just dropping a watch. So in the context of copyright, it would be interesting to see what a court would deal with that situation. Now one major issue in copyright is the issue of orphan works. The issue of these works that people think, well, this work has been created in the 1960s. I'd like to include a portion of it in this work that I'm, in this new work that I'm creating. I've tried really hard to find who owns this copyright. Maybe the company's no longer in existence. How do I actually use the work? And that's certainly an ongoing issue in around the world, really, one that hasn't been accurately decided. When we'll look at the period of copyright in just a minute, but I don't want to give away how long it is, but it's quite substantial. So how can you be sure that a work that you're using is not protected by copyright? And how can you be sure that you're not opening yourself up to a potential lawsuit? Yeah. Yeah. If you, if you, I mean, yes, it is. I mean, what you can, you can purposefully abandon copyright in a certain way, at least to a certain extent. And this was something I was going to talk about a little bit later, but it's, has anyone heard of Creative, the organization Creative Commons? Yeah. So Creative Commons is an organization that essentially allows you to abandon some or all of your copyrights should you, should you choose to. And if we see copyright generally as an all rights reserve system, Creative Commons is consistently described as a some rights reserve system. So you can decide that, you know, you might want to allow anyone who wants to to reproduce your work for non-commercial ways without you without having to ask you first. You can go to Creative Commons and there are websites in Canada and around the world. You can tag a license onto your work and then people will be able to, to essentially use your work without your permission and don't have to pay. You can even, there are various licenses that you can create that where you can, you know, abandon almost all of your rights. And then I think arguably all of your rights should you, should you choose. But Creative Commons is the best tool to use. If you think that you shouldn't or you don't want to have copyright in everything that you create. And if you'd like to open that up and allow people to use it in a more free way. So it's a choice. It's someone that you can easily access online and easily tag to whatever works you're creating. So it is a tool to, but I recommend at least looking, looking at to see if it could help, help you as, you know, as individuals who are involved in creative fields or just individuals who are creating works or just someone who wants to take photographs, put them online and let people use them without having to worry about copyright infringement. Yep. Yeah. But people putting up on their signs can it again? Right. Yeah. Sure, yeah. Well, there is a minimum length in terms of, you know, how to get copyright, your work has to be of a sufficient length. One case that went before the courts, Exxon wanted to have copyright in the word Exxon. And the courts rejected that as being that's too small. It's not the proper subject for copyright protection. One of the reasons that was rejected was because well, trademark law is an option. You could trademark that phrase and then have the exclusive right to use that phrase in relation to certain goods or services. So if someone else tries to use Exxon, if another company, if Chevron tries to use Exxon in the context of an oil advertisement, for instance, in certain contexts that could be seen to be trademark infringement. Now Canada Games, and this is also getting into the Olympics, there are, there's a different set of laws that have been put in place to protect the interests of sponsors around large sporting events that are quite restrictive in terms of what someone can do. So in those laws, and those are referred to as ambush marketing laws, you're not allowed to, and this is just paraphrasing, but you're not allowed to essentially create the perception of an association with the games if you're not an actual sponsor. So that wouldn't have likely been issue around the Canada Games, certainly was a major issue around the Olympics itself. But that's more in the realm of trademark laws as opposed to, as opposed to copyright law. Okay. A couple of other basics that I wanna talk about so far. Again, you don't have to register your work, you can choose to if you want. Now in terms of, I think I've sort of held back this long enough, but in terms of how long copyright lasts for, now can anyone guess what the original term of copyright was from the statute of Anne? Yeah, okay. So we got originally 14 years, and if you wanted, you could renew it for an additional 14 years. So 28 years in total. Anyone wanna guess what the period of copyright protection is today in Canada? Pardon? Life plus 50. So the life of the author plus 50 years. Likely there'll be pressure on Canada to increase its term of copyright protection because other jurisdictions like the US and the EU, their term of protection is life plus 70. So it's a more substantial term of copyright protection. Then it goes from the life of the author still plus those 50 years. So it goes essentially when the author was born. So you'll see actually on, I think January 1st every year is referred to as public domain day by the Center for the Public Domain in Duke. And there's a list of all the different works that are now in the public domain. That's in the context of the US. So Canada's would be slightly different. We would be sort of 20 years earlier, but it's sort of the idea that at a certain period of time, those works will be released and available to all without having to seek permission first, yeah. It depends. It depends on what, on how the legislation is crafted and how the courts approach legislation. So that'll certainly be if Canada does decide to increase its term of copyright protection. It should be whether you can pull those works back from the public domain and give them an additional 20 years of copyright protection. I think there are some serious issues involved in actually going down that path in terms of freedom of expression issues and potentially also companies who might run their business model on taking works from the public domain and giving them new life and putting them into new context. But that'll be an issue that we'll likely have to confront in the next few years. Yep. Or what about local authors? Yeah, but if it's a work of joint authorship, then it's usually the youngest author. So that it would be three authors, the youngest one, when that person passed away, you count 50 years plus the end of the calendar year and that's the term of protection at that point. Pardon? Yeah, and that seems if two people authored something, one dies and then the other one outlifts them. Yeah. By 50 years. Yeah. Well, no, so it would be if you have, so the lives of the authors plus 50 years. So you count both authors. So if one author dies, the second author lives another 50 years and then dies. At that point, you count your 50 years. Yeah, and that'd be the end of that point. So it was a distinct advantage to working with younger people as well. Yeah. Yep. Is it worth at works? I'm not quite understanding the question. I think I might have just, I think I might have just had a thick tongue when I think I probably meant to say works both times. What is it worth? Well, the period of copper protection in works is life plus 50. So I think I might have just misspoken if I said worth. Only in the larger sense of the economic value of a copyright. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah, it's an asset that you can pass on in a will. You can, you can. You don't, but if you don't. Yes. Right, exactly. So it'll go to the person to whom it specifically assigned the residual legacy or would be passed through the Intestate Secession Act. Well, we're moving quicker than I thought we might, or sorry, I'm not quite where I thought we would be at this point. In terms of what people are interested in, I want to make sure that we're talking about, talking about that area. Should we talk about defense as a copyright infringement? What would people like to focus on for the next little while? Any questions or just broad areas of interest that you want to see focused? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Okay, great. So let's talk then about just generally defense as a copyright infringement and specifically the idea, do you have the right to copy something for personal use? So there are quite a few defenses of copyright infringement. Some are very narrow. So if you choose to read or recite in public, a reasonable extract from a published work, you're in luck, the Copyright Act will protect you. Some defenses are directed towards specific types of works like computer programs, some towards intermediaries, computers, libraries, archives, and museums, but there's one defense in the act that's particularly flexible and it's the fair dealing defense. So the fair dealing defense allows you to use a substantial amount of copyright protected expression without the permission of the copyright owner and without infringing copyright as long as your dealing was done for a certain purpose, as long as it was fair, and as long as certain attribution requirements were satisfied. So essentially it's a three step process. First, your dealing has to be done for one of five recognized purposes. For criticism, review, news reporting, research, or private study. Sure, yeah. Criticism, review, news reporting, research, and private study. Second, that what you're doing has to be fair. And in terms of whether it's fair, the court will look at a variety of factors, including how much you took, what was the purpose of what you did, what was the effect on the market, what's the nature of the work itself. So it'll take a look at a variety of factors to look at essentially it wasn't fair in terms of what you did. And then for certain types of purposes, if it's for criticism, review, or news reporting, you have to acknowledge the name of the author and a source. You don't have to for the purpose of research or private study, but for the other three, you do. So if the fair dealing defense applies, then what you're doing isn't infringing. It's not an infringing act. Now a fair dealing has been referred to as a user's right by the Supreme Court of Canada. And it's said to be, you need to give it a large and liberal interpretation. In terms of what a user right means, we're still not sure yet. But I think one thing we can argue is that if you have the rights of corporate owners versus a limitation or an exception, then the rights of the corporate owners could be seen as having greater sway over that limitation. But if you have a collision between a right and a right, then the court will be forced to undergo maybe a more subtle discussion of where should we actually establish the balance between these two things. Now another defense that exists in the act is the private copying regime. And this defense is much more limited than I think most people realize. So it was created in 1997 and it had essentially two goals. The first was to legalize private copying onto what we're referred to as audio recording media. And the second is to provide compensation for holders of copyrights for these copies. And how they're compensated is through a levy that exists on, again, certain types of audio recording media. So essentially what was happening around 1997, mixed tapes and CDs were leading to rampant copyright infringement, but it was impossible to actually enforce this infringement. So the system was developed to allow people to create these types of compilations or content without infringing copyrights and to make sure that creators receive something as well. This levy is paid by manufacturers and then likely is passed on ultimately to consumers. So basically you pay an extra quarter on any audio cassette tape you buy or an extra 30 cents on CDR and CDRW. Now, one of the issues with this legislation is that it really does only apply to limited sorts of audio recording media. Maybe, can anyone raise your hand if you've bought any cassette tapes in the last three weeks? So cassette tapes may be less, not necessarily as applicable today. CDs certainly are still applicable, but people are purchasing fewer and fewer CDs. So one of the questions that exists today, what about MP3 players? What about cell phones? What about computers? These are all audio recording media or we can conceive of them broadly as audio recording media or something that you use to essentially put content on if the purpose of the system was to compensate creators for unauthorized copies and to allow people to make copies of works without infringing copyright. It seems like we should just expand this system to include levies on computers, on cell phones and on MP3 players as well. Now with respect to the current levy, it only applies to or it only protects essentially music producers. So again, it was cassettes and CDs. Initially when the levy came into play, people were just putting music onto CDs. So it's thought that, well you add an extra quarter to a cassette, you add an extra 30 cents to a CD, that'll go into a fund and it'll later be distributed out to those artists, to those musicians. Can anyone see any issues with respect to now adding a levy onto iPods or computers or cell phones? Yeah. Right, so some people are subsidizing then. Some people are providing a levy who never intend to do any sort of downloading of unauthorized materials. So they're subsidizing it from one perspective unfairly. Great, yep. Well have you already paid for music? Yeah, so let's say you buy the music on iTunes and you wanna put the music onto a blank CD. You only pay the levy onto a blank CD, but you've already bought the music. Why should you have to pay again to use the content? Any other issues with yep? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think one of the main issues are if the copyright owner hasn't authorized the dissemination of that content online, if they haven't authorized that streaming video to go through, then they likely aren't receiving a cut of any profits that are made through advertising revenue or through other sources. So the argument is that well, if they're not receiving that revenue, it'll be harder for them to actually, to distribute that type of content in the future. So it should be not allowed because they're not the ones who are authorizing that action. Another issue too with computers is if you compare the storage capacity of a computer to the storage capacity of a cassette tape, and if you're paying a quarter on a cassette tape, how much will you have to pay on a computer? And will people actually wanna pay an extra $150, $200 onto a computer in order to have this levy that goes towards artists? MP3 player is the same concern, cell phones as well. Another issue could be, well, you know, the system worked quite well. When you just send it to the private copying collective, they distributed to musicians. There have been some criticism of this other system, but in one way you could see, well, it works, some gets to the artist. Another issue could be, well, we're not just downloading music anymore. It's movies, there's computer software. How will we create a system where you can actually disseminate the levy itself after it's calculated to all of those different rights groups? So is it actually workable in practice? So for a whole host of reasons, the levy issue has become incredibly controversial. It's been suggested as a way to make sure that people just aren't breaking a copyright law with respect to actions people engage in, in many cases on a daily basis. It's been suggested as a good way to provide compensation to artists, but there are a lot of issues in terms of whether this system can actually be made workable. But this brings into the general question, do you have a right to copy for personal use? So we see with this private copying regime, it's quite limited. It only applies if you copy to a private recording, to an audio recording medium. As we've seen, those are very narrow. It only applies if you're copying music. It only applies again in a few certain contexts. So if it's done in a private way, if you then give that copy to someone else, it's not seen as applying in that context. So very limited right to copy a work. Also fair dealing, if you download a work, just the active download itself, that's you're reproducing the work and that scene is falling within the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. You have to establish a defense. Well, you have to turn to fair dealing. And if what you're doing is for the purpose of research, for the purpose of private study, well then that's okay if you can establish your action was fair. But if it was just to get a copy of a work, it would be difficult to actually argue that that would necessarily fall within private study or would fall within research. So there's a limited right to copy for personal use, but only if you can fit within these other defense. There's no broad right to copy anything for personal use. Yep. That might give some prescription on personal purposes. But what I heard you saying was that in practice, judges would be faced with assessing the context in which this copy was done. So I'm just wondering, has much of this come before the courts and has there been much case law establishing that whether or not those limits are fair in the law research? No, that's a great question. I think I think I know what you're referring to. Basically, around every photocopy, there's a list of exactly how much you can copy that's fair. Those are more guidelines that are set out in terms of licenses with access copyright. They're not necessarily how the fair dealing defense is interpreted. So in terms of fair dealing, it's this one of the wonderful things about the defense, one of the heavily criticized aspects of the defense is it doesn't put in any bright line distinctions. So it doesn't say, well you can take up 25% of the work, that's fair, more than 25% not fair. It just looks at, did you do it for the purpose of research? Let's look at all the factors that were involved and at the end let's make a determination of whether that was fair. So in one way it's flexible. That flexibility though isn't necessarily always helpful because the only point at which you know it's fair is where a court says it's fair. So it does create a lot of gray area which depending on the individual or the institution's risk tolerance. Risk tolerance. Yeah, exactly, it can mean that your fair dealing defense is actually much, or what you're using of the fair dealing defense is actually much smaller than what you should have based on the court saying it's a large, we need to take a large and liberal interpretation of it. Yep. Yep. Right. Do you buy a copy of it? Yep. Do you buy a new one? Or say you have to draw a new reader. Yeah. Technically you're not allowed to transfer. It depends on the terms of the license. So what I would say initially is I think the phrase that I bought an e-book is increasingly less accurate in the online context. It's more sort of opening something at Christmas. I'm so excited I just licensed for a set period of time for a certain number of e-book readers this content. So it's replacing ownership of something with a license and a license with set restrictions that are within the terms of license itself. So if you look at iTunes, it's a good example. With iTunes you're allowed to transfer, you can back up your content because iTunes says that that's okay for you to do that. You can transfer your content to certain computers that you authorize. You can transfer your content to your iPod. But beyond those elements, you're quite limited in terms of what you can actually do. You're limited by the terms of the license. And essentially what a license is, it's just permission to do what would otherwise be an infringing act. So what we need to look at now in terms of e-book readers are what are the terms of the license allow you to do? And it's the same thing with being able to access content through different services through university libraries, for instance, in terms of service like Hine Online, for instance, or any other service that you subscribe to. What are the terms of the license? Can you print something out? Does it allow you to make certain reproductions? Can you send that to someone? Can you put it in a closed environment? And in a lot of instances, what Katie and Quartz and what the Copyright Act says you're allowed to do is less important than what are the terms of the license say you're allowed to do? Yeah? So in the context of academics dealing with papers and textbooks, you're actually legitimately going to be using it for studying or research. Yeah. It doesn't matter what license they give you, but you're going to be able to have this fair dealing defense. You can rely on fair dealing if you're using something for academic purposes if you're taking a copy for research, taking a copy for private study. Where the issues, a lot of the issues come in in terms of the academic or educational context are what happens in the context of teaching? What if you want to take an article on use it, distribute it to your class? One of the notable cases that have come out recently is you can't, or it's not fair to make a copy of a work, make 30 copies and distribute it to an entire class of students. So one of the Quartz looked at, is that fair and they came down the side that it's not fair? So it's not fair to distribute it, but it's fair for them to. It's fair and it's even fair for those individual students to take one copy for the purposes of research. There's just the idea of making multiple copies and then distributing them wouldn't be seen as fair under the second step of the fair dealing analysis. Is that? Yeah. It's a couple of, but if they post a file to your website, to get it, then they're making copies. But there's a second infringing act. Remember we talked about communicating the work to the public by telecommunication. So if you post a work to an online environment and then 30 students access it, when those students pull that content down, that you'll be seen as engaging a different act and it'd be a different fair dealing or different fairness analysis than the student pulling one copy down. So there are multiple infringing acts in that potentially infringing acts in that situation. Yep. The source on the document, trying to update for the copy, the source and the author. Yep. Doesn't that protect the teaching? Generally I would say no. I think. It sets off with Jordy. Yeah. Right, I think actually Jordy is a great person to talk to you about this, because basically in terms of what the requirements are for access copyright. So in order to make copies, if you write down, I made 30 copies of this document. Here's all the information of it. Then compensation will be paid from the school to the collective, which will be then paid to the owners. But absence any collective agreement, then that would, yeah. Actually, privacy protection and this interrelationship with copyright is quite an interesting topic. And it's in a lot of ways the reason why we haven't had the same mass lawsuits of users in Canada that we saw in the US. That Canada's privacy laws, companies were able to turn to those privacy laws and essentially were stuck between, do we pass along this information? Do we risk a copyright infringement lawsuit or do we infringe the privacy rights of our users? So the strong privacy laws that exist in Canada have helped sort of stave off that type of mass lawsuit. It won't prevent it. The court has set out a list of steps that could be taken in order to access those, that information, but it certainly has played a role in the different approach to IP enforcement in Canada as opposed to the US. Sure, yeah. If you're not within access copyright, you're not dealing with a legal or not allowed to just make copies and pass it over to the whole class physically, you could send each person, each student to the library and say, go get that journal and make the copy for yourself, you could do that. Based on the way that the law is currently written and interpreted, it seems like, especially the latest decision from the federal court that if multiple copies are distributed that that wouldn't be seen as fair. But the idea that individuals can take a copy of a work for their own research purposes has been said to be in various decisions. That's something that would fall within the fairness criteria. So in the electronic environment, if you put a source back to the article, you could put that on your website. Yeah, two situations there. One, in a lot of cases, that would fall within the terms of the license that you would have with those sorts of electronic resources. But second, that would seem to be consistent with the decision in the past that if one individual takes a file or makes a copy for their own research purposes, that would be seen as falling within what would be fair. Yeah. One last question. Sure. If you have a work that's in paper form, can you photocopy it in a scan and then put it up on a web? That's definitely going several steps too far. Well, I think you can count a couple of different potentially infringing acts there. You basically look for whatever reproductions are there. If you put something online and you're potentially communicating to the public by telecommunication if someone does pull it down. But again, that would only be the first step of the analysis. The second step would be, well, do you have a defense? Is there a defense that you can rely on? Yeah. Are there public right volunteers in there? Defense doesn't get the line? Well, potentially. Certain companies have monitored photocopy rooms in the past in the attempt to get basic information about what uses people are making of materials. So there have been corporate monitors in the past. I don't think that they're permanent fixture. I think it was more of a temporary information gathering, information gathering exercise. Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Okay, okay. It's late, I think in a recent case it was the content that was looked at, what are elementary schools and what are other schools doing in terms of copying works. I was going to talk a little bit about Bill C-32, but as we saw a few days ago, Bill C-32 is no longer an issue. One thing I do want to mention briefly because I think it will come back again is technological protection measures, which are also known or can be known as digital locks. So essentially what technological protection measures are, they are something like a lock that controls access to a work or that controls what you can do with the work once you have access to it. So you can imagine there's one of two of these types of locks. So if a TPM, so a technological protection measure is used on a book, then essentially it would control how you would access it or potentially what you could do with it. The reason why these came about, in the mid-90s there was concerns in the United States of what will happen when content goes online. You can disseminate perfect copies to incredible numbers of people. Each copy will be a perfect copy, different from if you tape from a tape to a tape, then 10 copies later you just get buzz. This will be a perfect copy to where how many times it gets disseminated, what can we do about it? And one of the answers was, let's find a technological solution, let's put a digital lock on a work. And this lock will prevent people from accessing it who don't have authorization and this will be a way to prevent people from disseminating works that they don't have the authorization to do so. One of the issues with that was these were very, very poor locks. It was very easy to break them. One individual has compared them to if you put a piece of tape on a corridor as opposed to an actual lock on the corridor itself. So the locks can be bypassed quite quickly, quite easily. So the locks themselves were quite insufficient as this tool to prevent the dissemination of content. So the idea was, okay, well locks aren't enough, let's create a legal layer around these locks. So let's make it an infringing act to break a lock no matter what you do with the content inside. Initially, the attempt to get those laws passed in the US failed, but it was successful in the World Intellectual Property Organization. So International Treaty was successful. On the strength of those treaties, it was then a law was passed in the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which then gave protection to these digital locks. Since this time, since 1998, the attempt is made in Canada to again put, to give legal protection to these types of locks. The attempt was tried in 2005 and 2008 and then again in 2010 with Bill C-32. And the way that the laws were structured in Bill C-32 was that it is an infringing act to essentially to break a lock that controls access to a book. And it's an infringing act for all except for a very narrow set of purposes. Those include unlocking cell phones, reverse engineering for software compatibility, law enforcement and natural security ideas or national security activities, and also access for persons with perceptual disabilities. But one thing that was absent from this list of exceptions to where you break a lock is fair dealing. So it wouldn't be an exception. You can't break, under Bill C-32, you wouldn't have been able to break a lock that prevents you from accessing a work to then use the work for something that would otherwise fall under your fair dealing defense. So one of the consequences of this could be that creators, students, consumers and educators could be prevented from exercising their fair dealing rights through the application of a digital lock. Another concerning development was that it was also proposed to make it an infringing act to distribute and market devices that could be used to circumvent technological protection measures. And one of the issues with that would be, well, if it's an infringing act to distribute these mechanisms, how can you circumvent them for any purpose, including law enforcement, unlocking cell phones, reverse engineering? So there is potential issues around whether these laws are necessary, whether they're a good idea, whether they protect business models, whether there's a sufficient balance built into these laws between users' rights and between the rights of copyright owners. So that's actually all I wanna say about Bill C-32 for now, or for now. Jordy. Yeah. Yeah, exact. What about education on purpose? Well, that could fall into, that could fall into potentially one of the exceptions. Generally for education purposes, it wouldn't, but you might be able to argue that it could fit under one of the narrow exceptions in terms of if you're a computer science student and if you're doing it for the purpose of reverse engineering in that context. So that might be okay, but it depends on the specific act and the specific wording of that exception. Yeah? So does that mean Canada law? Right, exactly, yeah. So in Canada, there's no law right now against, so if there's a digital law on content, it's not an infringing act to circumvent that TPM. Now, if after circumventing it, you commit copyright infringement, that certainly is something that could be still actually under our current copyright acts, but those laws haven't been brought into, the act hasn't been amended to include those laws up to this point. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think depending on how you conceptualize a gene, you could potentially argue that it would, if you can imagine it as a sequence of letters, for instance. And you could argue that it would be sufficient link for copyright protection, that it meets the originality standard, that it's a literary work based on our standard of literary work. So there could be an argument that, depending on how you conceptualize it, you could have copyright in that conceptualization of a gene. I think it's an argument that hasn't been made very often, that the main question with genes are, can you patent genes? Or is it someone that is too, that, yeah. So that's, it's more of a patent issue, but certainly I think it's an interesting issue to think about in the copyright context as well. Yeah, basically the distinction is, with a copyright, you can't patent an idea, or what's sorry, with a copyright, you can't protect an idea. With a patent, what you're trying to protect is the idea itself. So, and also in terms of the distinction between the two, much more the exceptions around what you can do with someone that's patented are much more narrow than in terms of what you can do with someone that's protected by a copyright. So if it's protected by a copyright, you can take the idea behind it, you can pull out facts or information, you can use that for multiple purposes, you can take it in substantial amounts, but with a patent, it's a much stronger wall of protection. But I think that the most important is likely, patents protect ideas, copyright protects expression. Yeah. What's the way to patent this? 20 years. So I, yeah? I said a couple. Sure, yeah. But first this should be quick. You're talking about, yeah. So what out of the, let's say there's 200 countries in the world, how many aren't involved in these treaties? That's a good question. I think not many countries are not involved in these treaties at all. I can't give you an exact number, but it's, I think the majority of the world is covered by, is a country that's in the WTO or in the burn convention itself. So it's interesting actually if you conceptualize a map of the world and if you look at, someone creates a work in one country, immediately protection will spring up in countries around the world. It'll be of different type of protection that will last for different durations. So Canada protection will expire while it still exists in the US, for instance. But in most of the countries around the world are protected by these copyright laws. And then another question is, what about making a copy of something, so I don't like kind of copying something. So similar to what you said at EBE, posted an American server. Yeah. And then someone downloads that in Canada. Yeah. You haven't made a copy within Canada. If you download it in Canada? Right. Well, if you download the working. It goes up in Canada. But you are making a reproduction in Canada. What the courts have, yeah. I mean, but more generally my question is, yeah, what role does the border play in all of these? Yeah, no, that's a great question. This one, the Supreme Court of Canada struggled with about seven years ago. But it decided that as long as there's a real and substantial connection, the court can, the Canadian courts can hear a claim for copyright infringement. So that could be if a server is located in Canada, if the work is posted in Canada, the work is downloaded in Canada. So they're, if what you need to look for is, the law won't you look for a real and substantial connection? Yes. That's quite a controversial aspect of those protective measures. Because, you know, really wanna, if there's nothing that I'm aware of that compels distributors who put these types of protective measures on works to remove them after the period of copyright protection. And they can also potentially be used to apply to works to which, you know, there's the works that are in the public domain more generally or works that aren't connected to copyright. So it does pose quite problematic issues in terms of the scope protection. And if we think that orphan works themselves are problematic, what about sort of, you know, orphan protective measures if you can't find a key to actually break these locks? Yep. What I think I might close with is just by talking briefly about why I think copyright matters and why we should care about copyright reform. Since its inception, so since the 1700s, we've seen copyright expand dramatically in scope and duration of protection. And as well in a digital world, many actions again involve reproduction. So a temporary copy, a copy on a hard drive, on a website, so copyright laws increasingly involved in the lives of individuals. But because of the way that copyright laws are currently structured, some of the opportunities that are presented by digital technologies for the advancement of human rights might actually be lost. So digital technologies can create these incredible opportunities to disseminate material for educational purposes around the world. So promote the human right to education. So you can essentially distribute textbooks or papers to all the corners of the world. You can quickly and easily translate material into every language. You can create a modern-day digital library of Alexandria, so promoting the human right to preserve a cultural heritage. We've seen many different examples. Google Books is likely the biggest, but we've also got Project Gutenberg, Brewster Kales, Internet Archive. Really an incredible number of digital library projects. You know, it allows us to engage in a creative way in works to the extent that just wasn't possible before and then to disseminate the results of this engagement with a broader community, so enhancing and promoting the human right to freedom of expression. And then you see that with mashups, so where you take pieces from two songs, combine them together into one song, machinima, where you're making your own videos within the context of video games or fan fiction, where you write back to your favorite television programs. We can assist in enhancing democratic discourse in the search for truth, through being able to post or comment on stories, to add videos, to really promote and advance citizen media. But through copyright laws, these, essentially these opportunities can be lost. So lawsuits against peer-to-peer systems can hurt the ability to disseminate material for educational purposes. Lawsuits against intermediaries can cause a chill in terms of how user-generated content can be uploaded or can be treated. Lawsuits against individuals can chill those individuals' desire to actually post-comment or post-material or reflect on material. So copyright matters, to me at least, because through copyright, some of these opportunities can be lost. So I do believe that we have to revisit Canada's copyright laws to ensure that a balance should be struck between the rights of users, owners, and other parties. So to ensure that we have a balance between property rights and human rights. So May 2nd, big day coming up, there will be an election. If you're concerned about copyright laws and their impact on human rights, you'll ask the candidates in your writing what their positions are on copyright reform and use this information as just part of your decision-making process on what you're going to do on May 2nd. So I just wanna thank everybody for coming out tonight. Really appreciate you coming and it's great to see everyone out here. At this point, I'll stop the formal part of my presentation, but I'm certainly happy to take any questions or any more comments.