Expand Fair Dealing

Expand fair dealing. Recent research in the U.S. shows that the real high–growth industries such as computing and communications benefit from fair use / dealing, and are harmed by excessive copyright restrictions. It is timely to add a new balance factor to copyright discussion: balance between business interests, in addition to balance between rights owners and the public good. This is a repeat of a comment also under another theme.

Comments

patrickgwelch — 2010–05–16 13:55:00 EDT wrote

This is definitely important for all Canadians, but particularly for students, teachers, researchers, academics, artists, etc.

R — 2010–06–04 00:32:34 EDT wrote

Current Bill C–32 basically invalidates all fair use case when a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is present thus rendering fair use unfair and useless:

Let people bypass DRM when the use case is a legal one like shifting format for a media you own, research, education, etc.

Even better, media owner should also have to help you bypass it if you can't figure it out yourself when it's a legal use case. Why would you have to be a cryptographer to backup your DVDs?

CEnglish — 2010–07–13 15:41:23 EDT wrote

As a director of R&D I have to agree with the expansion of Fair Dealing, and definitely lose the digital lock provision. Whether the experimental exception (for patents) or equivalent usages of copyrighted works in a testing environment (such as derivative works), the easier the material is to access and test with the more innovation that will happen. If commercialization is an ultimate goal then indeed permission should be obtained, but requiring it 'before' experimenting is such a large effort that it will simply not happen. The same goes for non–commercial culture uses and collaborations. They simply will never happen under permission–only based rules.

The digital lock provisions are pointless in this context. The point of fair dealings is usage that we recognize the user should not need permission to use. Digital lock provisions violate the very point of them by saying permission isn't necessary if the creator gives permission for it to be used without permission.

Digital lock provisions are also redundant in any other context. If they are broken for a usage that is already illegal, it is already illegal (redundant). If they are broken for usage that is deemed fair otherwise, they are worse than pointless, they are inhibitive of that fair dealing. Since fair dealings consist of education, criticism, and other forms of useful contexts, it harms those useful contexts.

Indeed, fair dealings need to be expanded to essentially all non–commercial uses, or uses that inhibit such commercial realization. Nobody is harmed by this but we all benefit.