10. Another Perspective

B. Options for Administration of Intellectual Property Rights in
CCCanadian Cultural Heritage Institutions (continued)

Theory and Practice: The Operating Environment

Since the inception of Canada’s comprehensive system for collective administration, various collective societies have been created and have filed their licensing agreements with the Copyright Board. These societies can be grouped by distinctive categories. The majority are based on genre, followed by language of publication.29 Societies also group themselves on the basis of the types of rights they may represent.30 For example, CANCOPY, the Canadian National Reprography Collective, represents authors’ reproduction rights but not their public performance rights. Therefore, CANCOPY grants the right to photocopy a work but not the right to read it aloud in public. There are many more collectives operating in the province of Quebec or for French-language publications than operating in English Canada or for English-language publications. This phenomenon may be the result of historic, political, and legal developments.31

The spirit of labor law and the Status of the Artist Act had a significant impact on the practical, as opposed to the legal, practices of collective societies in Canada. Many areas of the Status of the Artist Act, which is a labor law, conflict with the Copyright Act, particularly in collective administration. Its certification system has the potential to affect collective administration, particularly when associations seek to act both as collectives for the purposes of copyright administration and as associations for the purposes of negotiating collective agreements under the Status of the Artist Act.

Collective Administration in Canada: A Legal Framework

Introduction to
Managing Digital Assets