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November 30, 2004
Copyright Reform Is Not a Spectator Sport
Posted by
Michael Geist again, with a message for Canadian citizens that applies equally anywhere that copyright extremism is on the march:
It is time for teachers, researchers, education administrators, librarians and students to speak out loudly against proposed policies that threaten the use of the Internet within Canadian schools by establishing unnecessary copyright license fees that seek to extend the term of copyright to the detriment of Canadian historians, and that introduce new legal protections that threaten to chill scientific and security research. They should further seize this opportunity by presenting a positive vision of reform that could benefit Canadian research and the broader community.
Comments (2)
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1. Chris Brand on December 1, 2004 4:13 PM writes...
One thing Canadians can do is to sign the Petition for Users' Rights under Copyright at http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition
It will be presented to Parliament early next year, before we see the Bill to amend the Copyright Act.
Permalink to Comment2. Rafael Venegas on December 3, 2004 9:48 AM writes...
Recently and incredibly a local federal (USA Disctrict court in Puerto Rico) judge decided that the characters played by some comedians in a television program belonged to a television producer named Tony Mojena that they had previously worked for, even though the comic actors had performed as those characters before working for the producer. It is incredible because comic characters, as well as analogous singuing styles, are not peotected by copyright law at all.
As a suggestion, a newpaper story suggested that actors should become more familiar with copyright laws. I wrote to the newspaperpaerson:
a. The copyright law is unreadable and depends on jurisprudence.
b. Jurisprudence is not accessible and is confusing, even to lawyers.
c. If the actor consulted the previous producer's lawyer they would have been told that the characters belonged to the previous producer.
d. If the actor consulted the current producer's lawyer they would have been told that the characters belonged to the actors.
There is no way to "know" the US Copyright spaghetti patchfull law.
It is a comic world in the courts, when it comes to copyright.
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