The Copyright Board of Canada (French : Commission du droit d'auteur du Canada) is an economic regulatory body empowered to establish, either mandatorily or at the request of an interested party, the royalties to be paid for the use of copyrighted works, when the administration of such copyright is entrusted to a collective-administration society. The Board also has the right to supervise agreements between users and licensing bodies and issues licences when the copyright owner cannot be located. [1]
The Honourable Luc Martineau is the current Chairman of the Board of Directors. [2] [3]
A copyright collective is a non-governmental body created by copyright law or private agreement which licenses copyrighted works on behalf of the authors and engages in collective rights management. Copyright societies track all the events and venues where copyrighted works are used and ensure that the copyright holders listed with the society are remunerated for such usage. The copyright society publishes its own tariff scheme on its websites and collects a nominal administrative fee on every transaction.
A performance rights organisation (PRO), also known as a performing rights society, provides intermediary functions, particularly collection of royalties, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works publicly in locations such as shopping and dining venues. Legal consumer purchase of works, such as buying CDs from a music store, confer private performance rights. PROs usually only collect royalties when use of a work is incidental to an organisation's purpose. Royalties for works essential to an organisation's purpose, such as theaters and radio, are usually negotiated directly with the rights holder. The interest of the organisations varies: many have the sole focus of musical works, while others may also encompass works and authors for audiovisual, drama, literature, or the visual arts.
The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is a Canadian performance rights organization that represents the performing rights of more than 175,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers. The organization collects license fees through a music licensing program approved by the Copyright Board of Canada.
The copyright law of Canada governs the legally enforceable rights to creative and artistic works under the laws of Canada. Canada passed its first colonial copyright statute in 1832 but was subject to imperial copyright law established by Britain until 1921. Current copyright law was established by the Copyright Act of Canada which was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988, 1997, and 2012. All powers to legislate copyright law are in the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada by virtue of section 91(23) of the Constitution Act, 1867.
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office is responsible for the administration and processing of the greater part of intellectual property (IP) in Canada. CIPO's areas of activity include patents, trademarks, copyright, industrial designs and integrated circuit topographies. Structurally, CIPO functions as a special operating agency (SOA) under Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. CIPO is based in Gatineau, Quebec, part of the National Capital Region. CIPO’s current interim Chief Executive Officer is Konstantinos Georgaras.
An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details cannot be found. A work can become orphaned through rightsholders being unaware of their holding, or by their demise and establishing inheritance has proved impracticable. In other cases, comprehensively diligent research fails to determine any authors, creators or originators for a work. Since 1989, the amount of orphan works in the United States has increased dramatically since some works are published anonymously, assignments of rights are not required to be disclosed publicly, and registration is optional. As a result, many works' statuses with respect to who holds which rights remain unknown to the public even when those rights are being actively exploited by authors or other rightsholders.
The Copyright Act is the federal statute governing copyright law in Canada. It is jointly administered by the Department of Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. The Copyright Act was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988 and 1997. Several attempts were made between 2005 and 2011 to amend the Act, but each of the bills failed to pass due to political opposition. In 2011, with a majority in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party introduced Bill C-11, titled the Copyright Modernization Act. Bill C-11 was passed and received Royal Assent on June 29, 2012.
File sharing in Canada relates to the distribution of digital media in that country. Canada had the greatest number of file sharers by percentage of population in the world according to a 2004 report by the OECD. In 2009 however it was found that Canada had only the tenth greatest number of copyright infringements in the world according to a report by BayTSP, a U.S. anti-piracy company.
The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) is a U.S. system of three copyright royalty judges who determine rates and terms for copyright statutory licenses and make determinations on distribution of statutory license royalties collected by the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. The board, made up of three permanent copyright royalty judges, was created under the Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004, which became effective on May 31, 2005, when the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel system was phased out. These administrative judges are appointed by the Librarian of Congress.
A professional technologist (P.Tech) is a class of certification of engineering technologist and professional technologist in Canada and Malaysia respectively.
SoundExchange is an American non-profit collective rights management organization spun off from the RIAA in 2003. It is the sole organization designated by the U.S. Congress to collect and distribute digital performance royalties for sound recordings.
Crown copyright is a type of copyright protection. It subsists in works of the governments of some Commonwealth realms and provides special copyright rules for the Crown, i.e. government departments and (generally) state entities. Each Commonwealth realm has its own Crown copyright regulations. There are therefore no common regulations that apply to all or a number of those countries. There are some considerations being made in Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand regarding the "reuse of Crown-copyrighted material, through new licences".
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission.
Luc Martineau is a Canadian judge currently serving on the Canadian Federal Court.
Collection administration of copyrights describes the use in Canadian law of collective societies to manage licenses for copyrighted material belonging to more than one copyright owner. These collective societies are responsible for granting permission to use the works they manage and setting out what conditions users of their works must follow. Examples of collective societies in Canada include: Christian Video Licensing International and the Canadian Broadcasters Rights Agency
Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) v. Bell Canada, 2012 SCC 36, is a leading Canadian case on the application of fair dealing under s. 29 of the Copyright Act. It pertained to the use of previews of musical works on online music services that sell digital files of musical works.
Re:Sound is the non-profit performance rights organization in Canada that collects and administers Neighbouring Rights royalties on behalf of recording artists, including featured artists and session musicians and record labels in Canada. Re:Sound was founded in 1997 and in French is referred to as Ré:Sonne.
Robert A. Blair is a non resident member arbitrator and mediator at Arbitration place, and Chair of the Copyright Board of Canada. Blair retired as justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario in October 2017, after fourteen years. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and was previously appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
The Copyright Act is the legal framework that protects the use of an individual's work once the idea has been physically expressed. It is a form of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. Ghana's current copyright law is Act 690 issued by the Parliament of the Republic of Ghana. It was enacted on 17 May 2005 and replaced Parliament's Act No. 110, the country's previous Copyright law from 1985. The Copyright law affords protection to a variety of works, grants Copyright holders rights to their work and defines the duration of that Copyright protection.
Concord, the assumed business name of Alchemy Copyrights LLC, is the world's leading independent music company dealing in creative rights primarily in the music industry. It develops, manages and acquires sound recordings, music publishing rights, theatrical performance rights and narrative content. It is a private company funded by long-term institutional capital and by members of its management team.