Re: No longer free to write your own software either

["Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill" <byron@asimov.ab.hsia.telus.net>]

Okay, so what is the difference between "private" and personal use?  If
anything, private sounds to me to be more open ended.  Not to mention
that the Canadian Copyright Act is full of exemptions for "private use"
and "private study".  Do all of these exemptions provide some form of
compensation for the authors?  (Just do a keyword search for "private"
at "http://canada.justice.gc.ca/FTP/EN/Laws/Chap/C/C-42.txt";.)  And,
while copies of music for personal use are compensated does it reflect
a true loss in royalties?  (I would imagine that any form of copyright
agreement, such as CanCopy, will face these problems.)

In fact, here are some comments from CanCopy:

<QUOTING http://www.cancopy.com/newsletters/briefly-summer-97.html>
 After eight years' drafting and a full year of hearings in Parliament,
 Bill C-32, the legislation to amend the Canadian Copyright Act, has
 finally passed. 

 Creators, producers and users all made compromises. Among the
 most extensively debated were a number of exceptions for non-profit
 educational institutions, libraries, archives and museums, many of
 which apply only when a work is not "commercially available" in an
 appropriate medium.
</QUOTE>

Again, it does not apply to us, but it demonstrates that there can be
exceptions to the rules.  (I don't know whether this "commercial
availability" was incorporated into bill C-32, but the question of
commercial availability appears to be an open question in copyright
protection.)

BTW - when you live in Canada, Canadian law is what concerns you.

On the angle of books-on-tape, I really didn't think about them since
I *read* the real thing every day.  :-)

Byron.
 
Frank Townsend <ftownsen@iamdigex.net> wrote:
> You are, of course correct re "copying for private use" of copyrighted music
> recordings which is permitted by the Canadian Copyright Act.  Interestingly
> enough, however, the Canadian Act provides this right in conjunction with a
> right for "eligible authors, eligible performers and eligible makers. . . to
> receive remuneration from manufacturers and importers of blank audio
> recording media."  There is also a tax on blank audio recording media.  So
> someone does *pay* for this right.
> *
> In the US, *some* home copying of copyrighted recordings is probably fair
> use.

> I was not really thinking about music (or Canadian law for that matter) when
> I responded to Marsha, whose examples of a "personal use" exemption (a
> non-existent term under both US and Canadian law) were applied to a literary
> work by a U.S. author and a computer program by a U.S. corporation.