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course we
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encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded,
you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Canada has permanent-residency on the 301 Watch Lists prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representatives. A disgrace earned by the state of our domestic copyright law. As Michael Geist revealed this week, the EU has an equally dismal view of Canada. Ongoing efforts to negotiate a trade agreement between Canada and the EU came with a scolding. Here are some of our sins:
1) We provide a copyright term of life plus fifty years, instead of life plus seventy.
2) We insist that ISPs are not liable for the conduct of their users.
3) Our law is antiquated (last major revision was in 1997, as compared to the DMCA of 1998).
4) We have not acceded to WIPO Internet Treaties (which obscures the mundane detail that Canada is compliant with international obligations.)
5) Our current law is precise on one disturbing point: copyright is a set of limited rights. So said our Supreme Court (four times).
6) Instead of listening to our trading partners (current and potential) with respect to changing Canadian law, our Federal Government chose to engage with Canadians. In summer 2009 Ministers James Moore (Heritage) and Tony Clement (Industry) embarked upon a national consultation. 8,000 letters later we are still waiting to see what shape the next law will take, but in the meantime Canadian media industries are holding their own.
PricewaterhouseCoopers recently published their 2009-2013 projections of global media and entertainment industries. In their comparison of consumer spending on media and entertainment in North America, PWC writes:
Canada will be the fastest-growing country, with projected 2.2 percent compound annual increase compared with 1.2 percent compound annual growth for the United States.
Notably, in the category of recorded music (the realm of active copyright lobbyists) both countries show a declining compounded annual growth rate. But Canada's decline is projected to -1% whereas its American counterpart shows -4.7%. Similar comparisons to U.K (-3.9%), France (-7.4%), and Germany (-1.9%) all place the Canadian music scene as more stable. This, despite the state of our copyright law.
Jammie Thomas downloaded 24 songs from Kazaa and was sentenced to a fine of US$2,000,000. Joel Tenenbaum downloaded 30 songs and was fined $675,000. These amounts sound improbable, but could have a justification à la Becker: If the fine is high enough, then it should deter everyone from this activity. In fact, if the fine is infinity, then their would be no crime at all. That only works if there is no risk of error in the determination of guilt, in which case, the fine need to be reduced to account for type I errors. The level of a fine then reflects the gravity of an action and the likelihood of errors.
How do the above fines compare to other crimes? Gapers Block uses the Illinois Criminal code to find that file-sharing is worse than arson, child abduction and second-degree murder, among others. This just shows how ill-conceived laws are sometimes, and copyright and patent law unfortunately provides too many examples.
As I note in my article "Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way," Mises Daily (Oct. 1, 2009), there is a growing clamor for reform of patent (and copyright) law, due to the increasingly obvious injustices resulting from these intellectual property (IP) laws. However, the various recent proposals for reform merely tinker with details and leave the essential features of the patent system intact. Patent scope, terms, and penalties would still be essentially the same. In the second article of this two-part series, "Reducing the Cost of IP Law," Mises Daily (Jan. 20, 2010), I propose various reforms to the existing patent system--short of abolition--that would significantly reduce the costs and harm imposed by the patent system while not appreciably, or as significantly, reducing the innovation incentives and other purported benefits of the patent system. I list these changes below in generally descending order of importance, without elaboration, as they are discussed further in "Reducing the Cost of IP Law":
Provide for Prior-Use and Independent-Inventor Defenses
Instantly Publish All Patent Applications
Eliminate Enhanced Damages
Add a Working/Reduction to Practice Requirement
Provide for Advisory Opinion Panels
Losing Patentee Pays
Expand Right to Seek Declaratory Judgments
Exclude IP from Trade Negotiations
Other Changes
Increase the threshold for obtaining a patent
Increase patent filing fees to make it more difficult to obtain a patent
Make it easier to challenge a patent's validity at all stages
Require patent applicants to specify exactly what part of their claimed invention is new and what part is "old" (e.g., by the use of European-style "characterized in that "claims)
Require patent applicants to do a search and provide an analysis showing why their claimed invention is new and nonobvious (patent attorneys really hate this one)
Limit the number of claims
Limit the number of continuation applications
Remove the presumption of validity that issued patents enjoy
Apportion damages to be proportional to the value of the patent
Copyright
Radically reduce the term, from life plus 70 years to, say, 10 years
Remove software from copyright coverage (it's functional, not expressive)
Require active registration and periodic re-registration (for a modest fee) and copyright notice to maintain copyright (today it is automatic, and it is often impossible to determine, much less locate, the owner), or otherwise make it easier to use "orphaned works"
Provide an easy way to dedicate works to the public domain to abandon the copyright the state grants authors
Eliminate manifestly unjust provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), such as its criminalization of technology that can be used to circumvent digital protection systems
Expand the "fair use" defense and clarify it to remove ambiguity
Provide that incidental use (e.g., buildings or sculptures appearing in the background of films) is fair use
Reduce statutory damages
Trademark
Raise the bar for proving "consumer confusion"
Abolish "antidilution" protection
In fact, abolish the entire federal trademark law, as it is unconstitutional (the Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyright and patent laws, but not trademark law)
An interesting lawsuit complaint as reported by CourthouseNews.com:
Andy Warhol's estate is behind an "insidious" conspiracy to monopolize the authentication and sale of the late artist's work, according to a complaint in Federal Court. Susan Shaer claims that the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board routinely defaces authentic Warhol artworks with a "DENIED" stamp, thereby creating "artificial scarcity" and inflating the value of the art owned by the foundation.
By falsely declaring certain works as inauthentic, the board can "systematically exclude Warhol from the marketplace," Shaer says in her 43-page complaint.
Shaer says that without the board's intervention, independent sales would compete with the foundation's holdings in auctions and private sales.
Shaer says board members feel "free to abuse the authentication process in pursuit of their naked self interest."
The board's stamp of approval is necessary for anyone in the world to sell a Warhol work, which allows it to wield "disproportionate power over the Warhol market," according to the complaint.
The upcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals, shows how copyright has outrageously criminalized the use of sampling, which has been disproportionately popular in hip hop music. In this, it calls to mind the racially disproportionate impact of drug laws on minorities...
An executive at Lilly, Bernard Munos, has written a very revealing and candid article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery link here.
The article, "Lessons from 60 years of pharmaceutical innovation" confirms what many already know - that the productivity of the pharmaceutical R&D enterprise is declining and has been for some time. Stated differently, the cost per new molecular entity has increased rapidly. This has occurred despite mergers and consolidation in the industry, changes in R&D management structures and changes to the technologies used to discover new drugs.
He also admits that "in many organizations, short-term priorities encourage marginal innovation, which provides more reliable returns on investment, at the expense of major change." He recognizes, in other words, that the current incentive system rewards the development of me-too drugs over novel therapies.
Finally, he admits that alternatives to the traditional patent system, including prizes, may be required to boost R&D productivity.
If composers could set still-unmatched records of productivity without copyrights while managing to earn a living, imagine what writers could do in an environment that did not give them the hope of forever subsisting off past accomplishments. FULL ARTICLE by Gennady Stolyarov II
As I note in my article "
If composers could set still-unmatched records of productivity without copyrights while managing to earn a living, imagine what writers could do in an environment that did not give them the hope of forever subsisting off past accomplishments. 
