[pd-calculators] Update to Canadian copyright term flowchart

Tue Dec 16 21:43:53 UTC 2008

Hi,

I made two updates to the Canadian copyright term flowchart today and 
thought I would push them out there to others working on similar projects.

We were at version 4 of the flowchart before. Two similar problems were 
identified and fixed, so we're at version 6 now (attached).

Basically, the spine of the flowchart goes down the left side 
identifying special cases. In the first two special cases (photographs 
and "Crown Copyright"), the chart dealt with the special cases but then 
neglected to identify the subset of special cases that should be handled 
like the general case. These were formerly piped to the end of the 
chart, but should be piped back into the spine to run through the 
remaining special cases.

Hard to follow? So, for example, photographs are a special case for 
copyright term calculation in Canada, but only if they have corporate 
authors. If their authors are "natural people" (not corporations), then 
they should be handled the same way as any other work. The flowchart 
should send those back to the spine so we can capture the special case 
of, say, photographs that are anonymously published.

So photographs were one special case. The other special case is Crown 
Copyright, a quirk of Canadian law that gives a special copyright term 
to works created or published by the Crown (i.e. the government). But it 
was pointed out that if a work is co-authored by the Crown and by one or 
more other non-Crown authors, then the term of copyright for the work 
may depend on the non-Crown author. These cases should be piped back to 
the spine. Having made that change, we can now accommodate works 
published jointly by the Crown and pseudonymous authors!

So that puts us at version 6 of the flowchart. I am attaching the Dia 
file (see http://live.gnome.org/Dia) and the PNG image version here for 
your enjoyment. They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 
2.5 Canada licence:
   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ca/

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
Andy Kaplan-Myrth, M.A., LL.B.
Barrister & Solicitor
------------------------------------------------
email: andy at kaplan-myrth.ca
web: http://kaplan-myrth.ca
blog: http://blog.kaplan-myrth.ca
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