Hi everyone,
I came across this piece of news on the web today and could not help but feel compelled to share it with you all, given its relevance to our course material!
I wonder what the impetus behind the launch of this initiative is. As far as I can tell, intermediaries are already well protected under Canadian copyright law, pursuant to the decision in SOCAN v CAIP (2004) and the provisions found in the Copyright Act at section 2.4(1)(b). Does anyone have any ideas of what this public consultation might be getting at?
Communications Law
I think it is not getting at further protecting intermediaries, but rather at providing revenue for content producers. This is launching into the same adventure that Australia went through with Facebook…
From the consultation: “Many rights holders have argued that [the current framework] effectively diminishes their remuneration for uses of their content online … They have therefore argued in favour of modifying the safe harbour protections to incentivize public content-sharing services to pay rights holders equitably for uses of their content …”
The suggested “possible Government action” which will be of course most controversial:
“compel remuneration of rights holders through collective licensing of their copyright-protected content on certain platforms;”