[Electronic Information for Libraries] Access to knowledge for millions of people around the world who are blind or otherwise print disabled continued to grow in 2022 with eight more countries - including three EIFL partner countries - joining the Marrakesh Treaty for persons with print disabilities, administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
[Michael Geist] Canadian copyright lobby groups have relentlessly lobbied the government to overturn decades of Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence, seeking unprecedented restrictions on fair dealing that include eliminating it for educational institutions if a licence is available. In doing so, they have relied on a steady diet of misleading claims about the state of the law, the licensing practices of Canadian educational institutions, the importance (or lack thereof) of copying of materials in course packs, and the effects of fair dealing. This week is Fair Dealing Week, which provides an opportunity to set the record straight on Canadian copyright and education, backed by actual data on what takes place on university campuses across the country.
[Allan Rocha de Souza and Luca Schirru] Statutory limitations and exceptions (L&E) for copyright in Brazil are notoriously precarious. However, under the Constitutional framework, the courts have come to regard their interpretation as extensive and not limited to the situations set forth in the copyright law. As it stands now, they must be considered as a flexible set... Despite the flexible character of L&Es in Brazil, none of them directly addresses uses for the purpose of research or text and data mining (TDM). Nonetheless, policy discussions (both within the legislature and the executive) have started to address the issue, particularly in relation to innovation and the training of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
[Eleonora Rosati]... In mid-2022, the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) announced that Government would consider broadening the scope for unlicensed TDM activities and introduce a new E&L that would allow TDM for any purpose (including commercial TDM), subject to a lawful access requirement to the relevant copyright works and other protected subject-matter. The latest news, however, is that such a reform will not go ahead. Indeed, yesterday the UK Minister for Science, Research and Innovation confirmed that any such plans have now been axed...
[Electronic Information for Libraries] EIFL has written to the President of Nigeria, His Excellency Muhammadu Buhari, requesting that he sign the Copyright Bill 2022 (SBs. 688 & 769) into law at the earliest opportunity. The Bill, which was passed by the National Assembly on 22 July 2022, overhauls and modernizes Nigeria’s copyright system. It supports the use of works in the digital environment to help foster a creative, technology-friendly ecosystem, and introduces new exceptions for libraries, education and people with disabilities.
[Jonathan Band] The Israel Ministry of Justice has issued an important opinion concluding that the use of copyrighted materials in the machine learning (ML) context is permitted under existing Israeli copyright law. In particular, the opinion found that ML typically will fall within the scope of the Israel Copyright Act’s fair use provision. The opinion thus adds to the growing body of law around the world permitting the use of copyrighted works for ML and text and data mining (TDM).
[Péter Mezei and Heidi Härkönen] Abstract: Exhaustion is a fundamental doctrine of copyright law, allowing for the resale of lawfully acquired copies of protected subject matter without prior authorization and payment to the rightholder. Following the debates on parallel importation, freedom of movement of goods, property rights v. copyright, and, most recently, resale of digital files, it is time to assess the relevance of the doctrine for a sustainable economy. More precisely, this paper addresses whether upcycling (transformative redistribution of materials based on the use of pieces/copies of, inter alia, works of authorship) fits into the doctrine of exhaustion.
[Deborah De Angelis] The legislative decree implementing the CDSM Directive in Italy was adopted on November 8th, 2021, and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on November 27th. It came into force on December 12th, 2021, amending the Italian Copyright Law. This blog post analyses the implementation of the copyright exceptions for Text and Data Mining, which is defined in the Italian law as any automated technique designed to analyse large amounts of text, sound, images, data or metadata in digital format to generate information, including patterns, trends, and correlations (Art. 70 ter (2) LdA). As we will see in more detail below, the Italian lawmaker decided to introduce some novelties when implementing Art. 3, while following more closely the text of the Directive when implementing Art. 4.
[Elizabeth Reade Fong] Legislation is meant not only to protect but to bring equity. And copyright legislation is not meant to be any different. However, the reality on the ground in a developing country like Fiji has only reinforced the inequity of access to and, more importantly, the use of information for learning and teaching and research for libraries and educational institutions. The pandemic exacerbated the situation!
[Electronic Information for Libraries] EIFL and our partner, the Association of Electronic Libraries in Kosova (AELK) participated in a public consultation organized by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports of the Republic of Kosovo on the new draft copyright law. EIFL and AELK submitted comments on the new draft law. Our comments concerned three areas: compliance with the Marrakesh Treaty for persons with print disabilities, exceptions for libraries, and the three-step test (that sets conditions for the use of an exception).
[Sanya Samtani] In a unanimous judgment, the Constitutional Court of South Africa confirmed the Pretoria High Court’s finding that the Copyright Act 1978 is unconstitutional and unfairly discriminatory to the extent that it fails to provide for for people with visual and print disabilities. This vindicates a decades-long struggle by BlindSA, the applicants, represented by SECTION27. It is also the first instance of a Constitutional Court requiring copyright legislation to provide for an accessible format shifting provision on the basis that constitutional rights are limited by overly restrictive copyright laws.
[Sean Flynn] In a huge court victory that may assist human rights and IP advocacy, the SA Constitutional Court released a quite remarkable judgment today that “reads in” the copyright amendment bill’s disability provisions into the current law because of the long delay in passing the bill. The Court finds that the lack of disability exceptions in current law violates the equality right of people with disabilities. It also finds a violation of free expression rights that uses reasoning with broader import.