Si l’on ajoute à cela la récente autorisation de la photographie à la BnF, on se couche satisfait… en attendant la prochaine étape : la Bundesarchiv a déjà versé 100 000 photos dans Wikimedia Commons, la base de données de Wikipédia, et la deutsche Fotothek 250 000. Alors, à quand la BnF, la RMN, les AN et toutes les AD ?

Digital technology has evolved dramatically, changing the way Canadians work, live and engage locally and globally. The emergence of the Internet has blurred the line between creators, users, producers, and distributors of copyrighted works.

Canadian copyright law needs to be updated to give Canadian creators and consumers the tools they need to engage with confidence in the digital marketplace. These updates will also help foster creativity, innovation and economic growth.

The Government believes that Canadians themselves must be able to contribute if future updates are to be a true reflection of Canada’s interests. These nation-wide consultations are intended to provide all Canadians with a chance to voice their opinions on what is needed to make the system work, and to ensure that all perspectives are taken into account on copyright modernization.

You can access additional information about copyright in the “Support Material” box located in the right hand side of this page.

Please help us by sharing your views, responding to other participants’ comments and rating other participants’ comments. To share your views, please click on “Reply to Topic”.

What Is Copyright?

Copyright is a legal concept giving the creator of an original artistic work rights over their work for a limited time.

Before the 1911 Act in Britain – on which copyright law in Bangladesh is based – the protection was between 7 and 14 years. In 1911 it was increased to 50 years from creation of the work. In 1956 it was increased further to 50 years from 1st publication. Towards the end of the last century it was 70 plus life of the author.

In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku’s intellectual property rights let the game’s popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off. “This openness is more in keeping with Nikoli’s open culture,” said Mr. Kaji, who sat on a sofa in his Tokyo office among pillows adorned with printed faces of racehorses. “We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”

The management of digital rights, as opposed to their enforcement, is a real problem in the publishing industry, but discussion is usually drowned out by the shouting matches about digital rights enforcement. Here's a typical use case: an editor wants to take an article with six pictures from her magazine's print edition and put it online. Two of the pictures come from a cookbook being reviewed by the article, two were shot for the article by a freelancer, and two come from a stock photo house. Which images can the editor use in the online version?

Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value.