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
separately identified and fixed, so
we're at version 6 now.
Here's the latest version of the chart:
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 now sends 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 are now 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. To open the
source file, install the open source program
Dia. And feel free to use these
and modify them: They are licensed under a
Creative Commons
Attribution 2.5 Canada licence. You can attribute them to me, Andy
Kaplan-Myrth. Thanks!
