Archived - LaCroix, Patrick

I have been a professional photographer for the past 45 years. During that time the Canadian Copyright law has been in a constant state of limbo. As a member of C.A.P.I.C. I have followed that organizations long and expensive lobbing of one government after another. It seems that just when we get close to some action, the government changes and we are back to square one.

Canada is one of the few western countries where the copyright is not automatically held by the creator of the work. It may be "work for hire" or, if it is created as a paid assignment by a third party, it is generally assumed that the third party holds copyright. This is however, a rather grey area. It is well past time that Canada caught up with the rest of the world and created a copyright law that protects the creators of images and text. I find it troubling that I, as a Canadian, have to send my stock photography images to the American Library of Congress to have my works protected by US copyright law.

In my opinion the new Canadian Copyright law should be drafted with the protection of the creators as it's first consideration. It is becoming all to common for people to grab images from the web and get away with what is, in fact, the theft of these images. In the US there have been huge settlements and fines for the illegal usage of creative images. This is, after all, the vehicle by which we make our living. Let's get caught up with the rest of the western world. Let's not have a paradigm such as seems to exist in the far east where the idea of copyright and patent means very little.

Pat LaCroix