Re: Re: Canadian Unlocateable Owner clause

> Hi Wallace,
> As far as I'm aware, the Copyright Board didn't do this until
> fairly recently (as these things go :-).

The practice started in 1990, and was formalized by MOUs with Excess Copyright and Copibec in about 1998.

> and again, as far as I;m aware, they
> made the decision to go through the Access copyright collective -
> at least for print materials.

Access Copyright has no business being "gone through".

One of the steps you have to go through in order to be able to get such a licens is to show that you have inquired at the appropriate collective, and they haven't been able to help you out. They don't represent the copyright owner; the work isn't in their repertoire; their members had nothing to do with creating the work or owning or administering its copyright; YET THEY GET PAID FOR IT ANYWAY.

By all means, the Act should provide for a mechanism to use orphan works. And if it has to be a bureaucratic bunch of red-tapery, so be it; it's the Canadian way.

But the collectives do not have any place collecting the license fees (if, indeed, those fees should be levied in the first place).

It's wrong, Excess Copyright will say, for me to appropriate to myself value from Margaret Atwood's work.

Why should Margaret Atwood then get value from someone else's work? She didn't write it. She doesn't deserve it.

> Do they also go through them for unpublished
> materials where the death date of the author is not known?

They don't go through them for ANY unpublished materials. Unpublished works are deliberately, if stupidly, left out of the scope of s.77 of the Copyright Act.

> I've looked at a few of their decisions, as listed on the Board's
Web site,
> and to the best of my recollection, there's no mention of the
collective. Do
> they use the other collectives for other media?

There are at least 61 "unlocatable" licenses that have been issued since 1990, in which the applicant has had to pay one of seven CopyBorgs:

 ExcessCopyright/Can'tCopy
 CARCC
 SARDEC
 SODART
 UNEQ
 COPIBEC
 SODRAC
> Seems to me that there's a potential court challenge here. I don't
> know anything in Canadian copyright law or reg's that sanctions the
> Board's behaviour, do you?

s.77 gives them fairly broad leeway, but it doesn't make these sweetheart deals with the collectives any less wrong.

> At best it's a way of getting the traffic off their
> plates so they can deal with 'more important' things, like the
> various tarrifs for playing and recording music, etc.

If it's that much work, (A) it's their job to do, not the collectives'; (B) the collectives aren't doing anything anyone else can't do; and (C) maybe they need to streamline the process by which one becomes legally permitted to make use of orphaned works.

> At worst it's just as you said - feathering the nests of others who
in all
> likelihood bear absolutely no relationship to the actual author of
the piece.

It's not a likelihood, it's a certainty. Received on Wed Mar 08 2006 - 05:15:30 GMT