CCH Legacy Conference 2025 – My Slides

I’ve just come back from speaking at an excellent conference on The Legacy of CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society Of Upper Canada and Future of Copyright Law Conference 2025 on September 19 and 20, 2025.

Despite the noble efforts of the organizers, there were a couple of disappointments. The Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, who wrote the CCH decision and who was expected to speak at the beginning of the conference, cancelled just prior to the event. Another was the absence of David Vaver, perhaps the most widely read and cited author and authority of the Canadian copyright law academy.

“The Panel Recordings will be available soon! Stay tuned!”

In the meantime, here are my slides from my presentation entitled “To “Actualize” Users’ Fair Dealing Rights: Guidelines If Necessary But Not Necessarily Guidelines” – which I hope to expand into a useful paper in due course for the expected compilation publication resulting from the conference.

HPK

Access Copyright + Copibec: Their Offensive Budget Bluster

As an affiliate of Access Copyright, from whom I annually receive enough for a nice lunch for one or a rather modest lunch for two, I also get Access’s Updates. Here’s the latest from September 2025. Note this passage towards the end:

Access Copyright and Copibec Make Joint Submissions for Federal Pre-Budget Consultations

Access Copyright, in collaboration with Copibec, the reproduction rights organization for Quebec, participated in the pre-budget consultations undertaken by the Standing Committee on Finance and the Department of Finance in advance of the tabling of the 2025 federal budget this fall.

In both submissions, our organizations made four recommendations, reflecting the growing importance of implementing a regulatory framework for the fair and responsible development of Generative AI (GenAI) in Canada as well as the continuing need to repair the educational marketplace for published works.

Our recommendations are:

·        That compliance with the Copyright Act be an obligation of any normative framework concerning GenAI.

·        That no exceptions for text and data mining be introduced to the Copyright Act.

·        That transparency requirements for AI training be included in any normative framework concerning GenAI.

·        That the government amend the Copyright Act to clarify fair dealing for education, make tariffs set by the Copyright Board of Canada mandatory and enforceable, and ensure statutory damages are available to all collectives.

(highlight added)

These recommendations do not belong in a budget. Budgets are for important fiscal announcements that deal with financial issues affecting Canada as a whole. They are not for the purpose of hiding and deflecting attention from self-serving senseless lobbying efforts aimed at enriching narrow corporate interests and burying such initiatives deep in omnibus legislation where they can escape adequate parliamentary scrutiny.

Justin Trudeau shamefully resorted in 2022 – contrary to his explicit promise to the contrary – to using the budget process to hide bad copyright legislation amidst and omnibus legislation. See Oops! He Did It Again: Budget 2022 Hides Copyright Time Bomb By Throwing Parliamentary Scrutiny Under the Omnibus Bus. Trudeau caved then to the copyright content crowd.  Let us hope that PM Mark Carney will NOT repeat that shameful error in the budget expected on November 4^th, 2025. The unexpected, early, and regrettable departure of David Lametti as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister removes a potentially highly principled and expert source of wise advice.

The Access Copyright and Copibec proposal to make tariffs mandatory and enforceable with statutory damages is drastic, indefensible, and contrary to very longstanding legislation and Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Trying to sneak this into the budget process is indefensible and, indeed, extremely offensive. And I’m not using the word offensive in the strategic sense of aggressive but rather in the more fulsome sense of disgusting and deplorable.

HPK