The great change begins now. The general duration of copyright in Canada for a protected work of art is now increased from 50 to 70 years after the calendar year of the author’s death.
A concrete example ? The rights to the writings of Quebec novelist Adrienne Choquette (died October 1973) were due to expire at the end of 2023, including for her most famous novel (or long story) Laura Clouet. They will now be protected until 2043.
Some property rights are theoretically eternal (those over a house, for example). Intellectual property rights have a limited duration.
Canada’s decision (author’s life + 70 years) stems from the new version of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) on free trade, which entered into force in July 2020. The States The United States and Mexico already apply the 70-year rule, as do many of Canada’s trading partners, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan. In short, Canadian law adapts to the international standard.
Longer period of protection copyright theoretically makes it more profitable to exploit a work, even if an Australian study from 2021 shows that the temporal extension does not have much effect on the income generated. Most of them materialize in the first years following the first publication. On the other hand, the harmonization of legal guidelines facilitates international exchanges.
Ottawa conducted several public consultations in 2021 before tabling two bills this year amending the Copyright Act (C-19 and C-244). The federal government has set the end of a transition period at the end of this year, and the entry into force of the new law on December 30, 2022.
Not an extender for everyone
The new regulations do not have the effect of restoring legal protections that have already expired. Clearly, artistic and cultural productions that fell into the public domain before 2023 will remain there. This is the case, for example, of the work of the poet and playwright Claude Gauvreau, who died in 1971. A right that was to expire on December 31, 2023 will, on the other hand, benefit from protection for 70 years after the death of its creator, of its creator or of the last surviving co-authors.
The legal changes are proving more complicated than simply adding twenty years to the copyright protection of all works. Several corpora benefit from a two-decade extension, but not all.
Among the works now protected by the extension are literary productions, plays and operas, musical compositions and works of visual art. There are also posthumous signatures and collective creations, whether all or only some of the creators are identifiable.
Among those that do not benefit from extended protection and only keep the “Life of the author + 50 years” version, we find the texts and other productions of the Crown (the productions of the combat camera of the Ministry of Defense for example), sound recordings, performances and certain cinematographic works without fictional characters.
Several pressure groups have criticized the new provisions simply because they will restrict in time the free public use of certain works. The case of so-called orphan creations, whose signatories remain unknown, is also a concern. These orphans now benefit from an extended protection of twenty years.
So-called inaccessible works add complexity. These are no longer commercially distributed. Public libraries have many of these materials for which it may be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain distribution rights.
The public consultations addressed the cases of fabrications of artificial intelligence (AI) and those used by the Internet of Things.
Algorithmic creation creates a legal headache both because it misappropriates potentially copyrighted human-produced images and text, and because machine-generated originals may themselves claim copyright. Connected objects (there are now tens of millions in Canada) can provide access to digital content protected by copyright.