Book People Archive

Re: In Canada, "Hollywood's MP" sent packing

        Liza Frulla also lost her seat last night.  She was the Heritage
minister which made her co-responsible for copyright (along with Industry
Canada).  She had replaced Helene Scherrer who lost her seat last June.
        Is there a copyright curse!?!?!?

        I would like to know what direction the government will take in
deciding whether schools have to pay a royalty to access the Internet.
This was dropped from a contentious copyright revision last year, but it
will likely resurface.  The revision died regardless when the election was 
called, because it had not been voted on by Parliament.

        There are quite a few loopholes in Canadian copyright.  In Canada,
we are required to pay a fee, a levy or a royalty to use commercially
prepared materials in the classroom.  We can buy public performance rights 
for a video, or we can pay a fee for taping a program off the air, but we
can't show packaged TV shows because there is no law for making
restitution to the copyright holder.  An example would be if an instructor 
wanted to show a boxed set of "Friends" on DVD.  (Don't ask why; just
accept that they do.)  When we phone American distributors to negotiate
the rights for this, they a) don't understand the concept of having to pay 
to show something in the classroom, and b) they often don't want to set up
a process for this, since we're such a small market.

        I wonder what small niche there would be for a book-oriented
entrepreneur who could exploit the absence of a service in Canada.  We
sometimes hear of a semi-secret Free-Trade tribunal which pays off
Americans who want to copy an American practice in Canada, but can't
because of local restrictions.  If "culture" is brought into the Free
Trade agreement by the new Conservative government, there could be some
easy money to be made!  Maybe we should make Jack Valenti the new Heritage
minister and just give up.  He was constantly railing against the
restrictions that limited American product to 95% of the market.

Stephen Davies
Calgary