Ruggier, Simon

Some of my opinions on copyright policy are outlined below:

Expand Fair Dealing

If the purpose of copyright law is to encourage creation, then one of the most important reforms to enact is the expansion of fair dealing. It is essential to facilitate the reuse of copyrighted material in ways that provide additional benefit to society. This is especially true when such reuse doesn't harm the copyright owner's ability receive compensation for their work, but also true in cases where the benefit to society outweighs the cost to creators. Some examples of purposes for which use of copyrighted works should be allowed without the permission of the copyright holder:

• News
• Social Commentary
• Criticism
• Parody

Shorter Copyright Terms

Copyright should be for the benefit of society as a whole, by giving people an incentive to create while minimizing the cost to society (i.e. minimizing the restrictions on public use of freely available ideas). Given this, it's ridiculous that rights would extend after an author's death. There is clearly no incentive for the dead to create more copyrighted works. An appropriate copyright term should be only as long as necessary to allow a creator to earn fair compensation for their work. I believe that 20 years would be more than enough to ensure this, and probably a reasonable limit falls somewhere between 5 and 20 years.

Richard Stallman, a long-time advocate of free software, mentions as part of his speeches that he thinks 10 years is a reasonable time period, since it's more than 3 times the usual publishing cycle, but that he has talked to authors who have rejected this, instead suggesting that a term no more than 5 years would be more appropriate.

Failing this, Andrew Gowers recently concluded that the 50 year terms granted in the UK are more than enough, while conducting an independent review of IP laws in the UK. Following this, he said: "Our conclusions were roundly criticised by the music industry in particular for actually doing the non-revolutionary thing of leaving the status quo in place, i.e. 50 years' term protection for sound recordings," he said. "I could have made a case for reducing it based on the economic arguments."

Strengthen the Public Domain

Excessively long copyright terms have an unfortunate side effect that by the time copyright protections expire, works may no longer be publicly accessible. This is a serious problem that turns copyright into a one-sided bargain. One possible solution to this would be to use the law to encourage the registration of copyrighted works so that they will be available when their protections expire. In the US, it has been suggested that registration be required outside of the term required by the Berne convention.

Encouraging the publication of source materials when copyright expires is another improvement the government can make to the public domain. This is particularly important for software, where the final product is much harder to modify than the source code, which usually remains private. However, it is also relevant to other areas, where the finished product (audio, images, video) may be based on source materials that are much easier to modify. When copyright expires, these materials are usually not accessible or public, and are thus lost to the public domain. A possible solution would be to encourage or require a submission of source materials as part of registrations.

End Crown Copyright

I've only ever heard of crown copyright being exercised when the government wants censor things it doesn't like, or to generate revenue for something that should rightly be free for use by taxpayers. We pay for government-produced works with our tax dollars, so they should be accessible to everyone.

Notice and Takedown is Flawed

The notice and takedown system used in the United States is severely flawed, and often abused. Stakeholders who don't actually own the copyright for a work abuse the system to remove material, where this is favourable for them. Rights holders themselves also abuse notice and takedown to indiscriminately remove material (see YouTube for many examples of this), even if it is legal under US copyright law. It is enough that rights holders are able to use the legal system to enforce their rights. To adopt a notice and takedown in Canada would open the door for similar abuses here, with absolutely no public benefit.

Link Circumvention to Infringement

Anti-circumvention law may be required by the WIPO treaty (which Canada isn't even obligated to ratify), but the treaty requirements can be satisfied by only criminalizing circumvention when it is linked to infringement. To criminalize it in absence of this link is to give publishers indiscriminate power over how their work is used, above and beyond copyright. In the US, publishers have already abused this to eliminate fair use at will. For example, anti-circumvention provisions in the US can make format shifting illegal, as well as text-to-speech for blind users of e-books, if circumvention is required to make this work.

Also, the holy grail for publishers is to be able to sell consumers copies of the same works repeatedly in difference, for example with VHS, DVD, UMD, BluRay, LPs, CDs, SACDs, books, e-books, and audiobooks. Technological "protection" measures only make it more feasible for them to do this, and it would be ridiculous to offer legal support for the practice by protecting TPMs.

In some cases, consumers actually pay for media that only work after talking to authentication servers, and then later on lose access to such media en masse when said servers are taken down. The media companies responsible for this unfortunate circumstance show no remorse for it.

[ Big Content: ludicrous to expect DRMed music to work forever ]

In the US, the anti-circumvention measures of the DMCA have also been abused in various lawsuits to hamper competition rather than protect copyrighted works. See:

Unintended Consequences: Ten Years under the DMCA for the EFF's overview of many abuses of the DMCA.