The Copyright Pentalogy

The lovely city of Ottawa

A little Canadian news before this blogger heads back to the UK: this week the University of Ottawa Press has published The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, a book which collates the work of a number of Canada's leading copyright scholars to attempt to examine the implication s of the five copyright decisions handed down by the Supreme Court of Canada last summer (see here and here). The five decisions all touched on different aspects of copyright law and different industries, so this book should provide a pretty comprehensive analysis of the state of copyright law in Canada at the moment.

The book is for sale, but the great (and unusual, for an academic work) news, is that it is also available as a free download under a Creative Commons licence. The book can be downloaded in its entirety or each of the 14 chapters can be downloaded individually. This is the first of a new collection from the UOP on law, technology and society, of which Michael Geist is the editor, that will be part of the UOP's open access collection.

In analysing the five decisions, this book covers fair dealing, technological neutrality, the scope of copyright law (in particular the establishment of a new "right" associated with user generated content) and the implications of the decisions for copyright collective management.

For those looking for more detail, editor Michael Geist will be writing more about the individual contributions on his blog in the days ahead and will provide more information on the plans for a conference on the copyright pentalogy being planned for autumn.