Locklin, Jason

1. As a researcher, Canada's copyright laws means access to scientific publications is severely limited. Even half-century old papers that stand as the foundation for various modern fields can be difficult to find because replication of them is impossible. Furthermore, collaboration is hampered because "sharing" resources (such as emailing PDF files around a lab group) means breaking the law. New technologies that have the potential to revolutionize research and communication in science (such as: http://www.mendeley.com/ and http://www.zotero.org/) are always burdened with legal gray areas.

2. A well typified "fair use" doctrine should be established to make it clear that certain activities (such as preservation, teaching, research, non-commercial sharing, personal copying) are established to be clearly legal. The duration of copyright should much better represent the typical commercial lifetime of a copyrighted work (generally <10 years for most industries).

3. Innovation is stifled when one can't "stand on the top of giants." A library of Canadian public domain work should be created (similar to archive.org). This would allow innovators to use the public domain as a resource to drastically speed the creative process -no innovation or creativity happens in a vacuum.

4. Investment relies on strong financial rewards for success. Resources should be devoted to strong, enforceable, laws pertaining to commercial copyright infringement and counterfeiting. Copyright should be short, but have serious teeth. This would foster quick turnaround of ideas and larger rewards for valuable contributions during their commercial lifetime.

5. A national digital copyright registry, mandatory for maintaining copyright past an initial grace period, is now a possibility with the current state of communications networks (the Internet) in Canada. This would make enforcement of copyright a relatively simple and quick process, accessible to innovators and creators with both large and small budgets. This would also allow for the library of public domain work as mentioned above (as works become public domain, they are transfered to the digital library for use by everyone).

Regards, Jason Locklin University of Waterloo