Ottawa

Potential copyright infringment: Not worth the risk.

Dear Overzealous Web Designer in the Basement of the Conservative War Room:

Hi! I know you’re probably busy dealing with the — uh, bandwidth issues that brought down DionBook (still readable – for now – via googlecache), but I just wanted to let you know about another potential headache-in-the-making over at notaleader.ca.

You know that line about how it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission? That’s actually not always the case — not when you’re talking about, say, copyright — which is something that you’d think the Conservatives would have learned by now.  

Yet, on your create-your-own-ad  flash thingy, there are all sorts of video snippets from various networks – CTV, CBC, TVO and possibly others – but I can’t find anywhere that it says that material is being used with permission.

In fact, there’s nothing to indicate where the footage came from at all – which is required if you were planning to use the ‘fair dealing’ exemption, although it’s hard to see how this qualifies as “criticism or review.”

Did you just forget to add that information? Did it get accidentally removed when you took down the puffin? Or are we heading towards another one of those copyright oopsies moments that seem to crop up with surprising frequency when y’all try to get down with your bad multimedia-user-content-generating selves? 

Anyway, hope you’re having a fab Day Five! Can’t be worse than Day Three, right?

ITQ

PS Say hi to The Ghost of Sir Charles Tupper for me!

Looking for more?

Get the Best of Maclean's sent straight to your inbox. Sign up for news, commentary and analysis.
  • By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy. You may unsubscribe at any time.