Internet: Pay For All Quotations?

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Prof. Michael Geist: "The longstanding debate over whether Bill C-18, the Online News Act, requires payment for linking came to an end yesterday. Government officials admitted that even basic quotes from news articles that include a hyperlink to the original source would scope user posts into the law and require platforms such as Google and Facebook to negotiate payment for the links. As noted below, even that position may understate the impact of the bill, which appears to also cover a user post of a news quote without a link. In other words, merely quoting a few sentences from a news article on an Internet platform is treated as making news content available, which triggers a requirement for the platforms to negotiate payment. This position runs counter to Canada’s copyright obligations under the Berne Convention and has no place in a country committed to freedom of expression."

How will this be made to affect us as individual internet users/publishers?

Comments

[jsburbidge]

IP being a purely statutory concept, government is by definition involved in it.

There is no such thing as copyright at common law; both the nature of the rights and their extent in time have changed many times. (Originally copyright, created under the Tudors, was held by the publishers - stationers - and was perpetual.)

Many of the changes in the bill are generally ill-advised, but it is an attempt to respond to genuine problems. One of the big problems is that of scalability: the internet allows micro-activities in domains that used to be possible only if you owned a printing press, but it has not been accompanied by a model of micropayments which would correspond to the requirements we have always put on actual publishers (modulo "fair use" - note that one requirement of fair use us not just that a citation be small but that it be as all part of the text containing it).

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And since more of us humans are actually becoming "publishers" of one sort or another in the wake of the Web's creation...it's getting more complicated.

And we may be seeing other complications from passing such bills, pace Prof. Geist again:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/12/a-tale-of-two-readouts-u-s-escalates-trade-concerns-with-canadian-digital-policy-as-canada-seeks-to-downplay-the-issue/