Copyright’s underuse hypothesis is simple: that, unless publishers are assured of exclusive rights in older works, they won’t continue to invest in making them available. This of course contradicts a core tenet of classical economic theory, that investors will continue to produce copies of books (or anything else) so long as they can expect to…

Readers in Europe and around the world may have heard some refreshingly contented murmurings recently about a new—and, “miraculously, an eminently sensible”—copyright policy report coming out of Canada. The report of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science & Technology, released earlier this month, was the culmination of a statutorily mandated parliamentary review of Canada’s Copyright…

Last week we published the first part of a two-part article summarising the essence of the presentations at the annual IP conference organised by the University of Geneva on February 22, 2017 (programme available here). This is the second part of the article, discussing the remaining presentations. 4. Scope of copyright: hyperlinking and framing as…

From the Celestial Jukebox to AI. We have now reached the “Celestial Jukebox” predicted by Prof. Goldstein,[1] and have even gone well beyond with the rise of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. These key issues were at the heart of the annual IP conference organised by the University of Geneva on February 22, 2017 (programme…

In less than a month Canadian Copyright law has been subjected to an unprecedented series of modifications that, without exaggerating, could be defined as revolutionary. First of all, on June 29th the long awaited bill C-11 (formerly C-32, C-61, and C-60) received royal assent becoming the Copyright Modernization Act. Canadian Copyright Act looks now much…