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

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."

Oh uh!

[NettiWelho]

Looks like the copyrighters forgot to butter someones bread.

Seriously?

[Nos.]

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?

Re:Good For You, Canadians

[Anonymous Coward]

Not needed. Canada's fair dealing became almost as liberal as the US fair use. But not quite.

I'm not an American exceptionalist, but really, this is an area where the US excels. If you take part of a copyrighted work and use it for commentary, news, satire, or educational use without trying to make a profit directly from that, it is okay. There is a reason that Wikipedia is based in the US. The US fair use is far more liberal than fair dealing that is used in most of the world.

Re:school photocopying?

[lurker1997]

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.