Mélanie Joly is the newly appointed Canadian Heritage Minister, and she's been given a briefing book by her ministerial staffers laying out the ministry's view of what's going on in the Heritage brief. The book's copyright section is a disaster.
Copyright is one of policy's great evidence-free zones, where doctrine trumps evidence in nearly every case. This was bad enough in the era when copyright only touched culture, but because the Internet works by making and manipulating copies, bad copyright policy has become bad Internet policy, with implications for everything we do online — health care, education, family relations, political organising, and more.
The Stephen Harper Parliaments, and their Liberal predecessors, made some shockingly bad copyright policies, including the passage of Canada's version of the DMCA, bill C-11, which was written by a disgraced Liberal minister and passed into law by her Tory replacements. The Conservatives also negotiated the Trans Pacific Partnership, which enshrines the DMCA-like provisions into a trade agreement, so that it will be virtually impossible for Canada to reform its domestic laws without breaching its trade agreements.
The civil service's briefing book to Joly frames the state of copyright in Canada in a very slanted way, and makes a number of very bad recommendations about how copyright policy in Canada should go.
Michael Geist has written up a detailed critique of the copyright chapter in the briefing book, with sensible suggestions for alternatives that the minister could explore. The new Liberal government is a huge relief after a lost decade of Harper rule, but they own a lot of terrible history in the world of Internet regulation and should be watched with care.
The reality is that the Minister would benefit from a second presentation that discusses issues such as:
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the emergence of technological neutrality as a principle of copyright law*
how Canada may be at a disadvantage relative to the U.S. given the absence of a full fair use provision*
the growth of alternate licensing systems such as Creative Commons*
how term extension for sound recordings was passed even though the issue was scarcely raised during the 2012 reform process*
why extending the term of copyright (as proposed by the TPP) would do enormous harm to Canadian heritage.
What Canadian Heritage Officials Didn't Tell Minister Mélanie Joly About Copyright [Michael Geist]
(Image: failcampmtl 2014 – 141, Eva Blue, CC-BY)
