Dealing with new life from the morgue: A report on key copyright issues in the Canadian news media

Abstract

At the time of writing this paper, the key Canadian copyright case was Robertson v. Thomson Corp. in which Heather Robertson, a freelance journalist, took on the publishers of Canada's oldest national newspaper. It's the classic “David and Goliath” set-up of an independent writer who struggles to assert ownership of her own work originally contracted for one-time-only publication in the Globe and Mail, but which was re-sold as part of much larger databases.

Even within northern nations, issues of copyright and creators’ rights create divisions, as the technology of dissemination evolves, the law (at least in English Canada) has struggled to keep up. This paper argues that authors and publishers must recognise themselves as being simultaneously users, creators and disseminators, and that what might appear advantageous at one point in the cycle of creation may well turn out to be disadvantageous in the longer run.

Speaking of longer run: Robertson, who first brought her case in 1996, achieved a partial victory in October of 2006, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that while publishers can disseminate the work of freelancers, they must reproduct it in context, maintaining the “essence’ of the original publication (as in a CD-ROM reproduction). But the fate of freelance work which has been distributed electronically without specific consent is unresolved, and will most likely to go trial. A decade on, this case has yet to be resigned to the morgue.

Keywords:

• Copyright
• creative rights
• news media
• freelance
• Robertson v. Thomson