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Canada's Supreme Court Strikes Down Copyright Fees On Music, Video

Posted by timothy on from the yes-but-can-you-get-good-barbecue? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Quick submission for all us Canadians: looks like the Supreme Court finally decided to rule on various copyright issues. No more fees to 'preview' a song. Another of these rule changes could save our schools a lot of money: no more fees required to photocopy material for students."

9 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Oh uh! by NettiWelho · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Looks like the copyrighters forgot to butter someones bread.

  2. Good For You, Canadians by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mind if we borrow your Justices? Ours seem to be malfunctioning...

    Signed,
    Americans

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    1. Re:Good For You, Canadians by compro01 · · Score: 5, Informative

      They'll be replaced anyway.

      3 of the Justices are due for retirement (SCC justices, like all other federal court justices, are subject to mandatory retirement at age 75) soon. Fish will be retiring no later than next year, LeBel no later than the year after that, and Rothstein by the end of 2015.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
  3. Seriously? by Nos. · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTA: "In another case, the judges found that movie theatres shouldn't be charged for the music that's part of a soundtrack. The court ruled that a “soundtrack” that accompanies a movie is not the same as the Copyright Board’s definition of a “sound recording” because the soundtrack is meant to be part of the movie and includes preexisting sound recordings. And finally, the court ruled that performance royalties do not need to be collected for music used in downloaded video games." So the industry wanted to charge movie theatres extra because of the music in the movie? Shouldn't that have been deal with long before when the production company (or whoever) got permission to include the song? Same thing for video games. Did they actually expect consumers to buy a game for $x and then later get charged $y for the music in the game?

    1. Re:Seriously? by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Funny

      [Sarcasm] you don't seem to understand! The *studio* that made the movie got permission to use that track, but the *theatre* that wants to play the movie wasn't involved in the contract process! The theatre wants to get free performance rights to some poor artist's work! How dare you call our attempts at seeking reimbursement for flagrant distribution of our client's works 'double dipping' and other pejorative terms! [/sarcasm]

      This is what happens when you let lawyers run free and wild, and let them take everyone for a ride.

      Seriously.

    2. Re:Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, it was weirder than that. They expected royalties because the game was downloaded, as if the act of downloading a game should generate its own royalty in addition to whatever was paid as a license to play the music during the game. Just to be clear: the ISPs were expected to pay this royalty for the downloading as if it was another "performance", regardless of what the creators of the game had already paid the artists. Effectively artists (or more precisely SOCAN on their behalf) wanted to get paid twice: once for the download, and again for playing music during the game.

      Some of the other cases they settled were somewhat similar. For example, for streaming music SOCAN was demanding payment for both streaming the music to the customer (e.g., from a company that had licensed music for customers to play) and from the ISP for downloading it to the customer.

      Yeah, it was really stupid. Basically a big cash grab from the ISPs, which of course would have passed it on to the consumer..

  4. Re:school photocopying? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Universities and schools in Canada have paid blanket fees to keep the leeches off their legs. No more. SOCAN et al just lost million$ of $.

  5. Better link by Hemogoblin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is a preliminary analysis from professor Geist. It's slightly more technical and interesting than TFA.

    http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6588/125/

  6. Re:school photocopying? by lurker1997 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There used to be an agreement called CAN-COPY or something like that where universities paid money to someone (not likely the authors of textbooks) in order to be able to have a fair use like system where you could copy a certain amount of a book for educational purposes. I remember it being no more than 1 chapter with a couple of other caveats. A few years ago, I taught a course where I distributed a photocopied chapter from another text to the students and (as best as I can tell) this was completely legal. The ability to copy parts of texts is much more important in the Arts I would think, where students are potentially given a collection of readings assembled from various sources.

    Anyway, in the past couple of years, something has changed and the CAN-COPY agreement no longer exitsts. Whoever has been getting money out of universities for this has decided to ask for more money and more restrictions (I think) because there has been a good deal of complaining about the new copyright agreement, and a number of canadian universities, including my own, have pulled out of the agreement and stopped paying fees of any kind. There are now new rules about what we can and can't copy, but I don't know them. We were told that someone (again, whoever is trying to extort money from us) will now be monitoring the courses at our university in order to make sure we are not infringing their rights. One suggestion I have heard is that we should password protect any course materials we have online, so that outsiders are not able to view them and scan them for potential violations.