This article by Queen’s University Professor Laura J. Murray analyses the rhetoric of “protection” ubiquitous in Canadian discussions of copyright policy, and identifies among the various uses of the term both a problematic assumption that protection is or should be the primary function of copyright, and overblown claims about copyright’s power to protect Canadian culture and creators.

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Two articles highlight the impact on the public domain of the turn of the calendar to 2005. Professor Lawrence Lessig writes about the impact in Europe and a push to extend the copyright term, while Wallace McLean chronicles the artists whose work came into the public domain last week.

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