Month: July 2012

Hot SCC Copyright Action! Part x in a series.

Nice houseSo you may remember back in December I wrote about the five copyright cases that were being heard in the Supreme Court. Well probably you don’t remember. ANYWAY, the decisions in the five cases (the “Copyright Pentalogy”) came down last week. And what do you know, they were all pretty much a big win for consumers, and for common sense. Yay, Supreme Court!

It’s really fucking hot, and I’ve got summertime to enjoy, so I have no desire right now to read all five cases. So I’ll be covering the cases (some of them?) over the next few weeks. If you just can’t wait, and you want to know about all five right now, go read Geist or Sookman. I’m sure they each have a team of students who read the cases for them. Me, I’m just one man. So let’s dig into one of the two most “internet-y” of the cases, SOCAN v. Bell, and see what rights for consumers have been affirmed by our esteemed judges.

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A court win for bloggers. Like me!

sound like meSo with all the media whoring over the last couple of weeks, I have neglected to tell you all sorts of interesting stuff. You may have heard that Bill C-11 cruised through the Senate and received Royal Assent. Ugh. When it actually comes into force I’ll write about it again. Oh, and here’s a very interesting article about C-11’s effects on isoHunt.com, with juicy quotes from some internet lawyer guy.

But what I missed that I really wanted to write about was a very interesting and important case that came out of the Federal Court of Canada, that is a real help for bloggers and other online journalists. Better late than never. Let’s take a close look at Warman v. Fournier (PDF), which allows for some significant copying of content on the internet. Yippee!

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