Gloominary

Welcome!

Hello, Gloominary, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 18:56, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

New article

Your new article is off to a poor start, I'm afraid. Before you spend a lot of time working on an article that might well be deleted, please consider the following facts (presented in no particular order of imporatance):

• Your article appears to be a research paper that, given the nature of the lead paragraph that you have written, will involve synthesizing conclusions based on different sources. While this is generally the goal of any good research paper written for an academic setting, Wikipedia is not an academic setting, and disallows the introduction of such synthesis.
• Your article's title is entirely too long -- I would suggest something along the lines of "Limits on copyright in Canada".
• You have created only part of an article. If you plan on developing the article incrementally, you would do better to write it in your own user space (such as at User:Gloominary/Limits on copyright in Canada).

Good luck! WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 18:56, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

This article is for a class at the U of T law school as part of some wiki project at the university it is by its nature more academic than a real wiki. Thanks.

But you are creating it on the "real" Wikipedia, and therefore it must conform to the guidelines for all other Wikipedia articles. If you and/or your professor are unsure as to how to use Wikipedia in an academic setting, please refer to School and University Projects. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 20:22, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Nomination of Limitations on copyrightability: Ideas and facts vs. expression; merger doctrine; scènes à faire in IP law in Canada for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Limitations on copyrightability: Ideas and facts vs. expression; merger doctrine; scènes à faire in IP law in Canada is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Limitations on copyrightability: Ideas and facts vs. expression; merger doctrine; scènes à faire in IP law in Canada until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on good quality evidence, and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article. RepublicanJacobite_TheFortyFive 19:57, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia

BTW welcome to Wikipedia. Do not take offense to the discussion above and many thanks for your attempts. Wikipedia does take some time to get used to. The underlying philosophy is reference, reference, reference and all should be good. If you wish any further advice do not hesitate to contact me. Our lawyer at Wikimedia Canada http://wikimedia.ca/wiki/Main_Page is working on getting law students more involved with Wikipedia. Cheers Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:56, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

I want to echo what Doc James wrote. I think the material you provided to the Copyrightability article is pretty good - the one message I would like to emphasize is that it's not necessary to start new articles for everything, it's sometimes better to add to a pre-existing article. PKT(alk) 20:44, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Merge

I have moved the content you where working on here if you wish to merge it to Copyright law of Canada.

In Canadian copyright law there are several Limitations to Copyright. These limitations define the scope of copyright protection by placing limits on ability of copyrightholders to deny other users or creators the ability to employ the ideas, facts, and concepts underlying their protected expression.

There are two major doctrinal devices employed to place limits on the scope of copyright:

• Idea-expression divide(see also the related notion of Scènes à faire)
• Merger Doctrine

Justifications for the doctrinal limits on copyright

One consequence of denying the use of protected expression by means of copyright is that in the absence of some limiting doctrine copyright holders might be able to deny other users the ability not only to use their own original expression but also to deny users concepts, ideas, and facts which form the basis of the original expression. A simple example concerns the copyright of an author in a work of literature. An author who claims copyright in a specific novel can limit other users from directly reproducing the work, or copying the substance of the plot, character formation, etc... However the law of copyright will not allow the author to limit the use of, for example, the idea of traveling around a fantastical medieval land which contains fanciful creatures because to do so would limit the use of this rather stock idea to other users.

Idea-expression divide

The ideas and facts vs. expression distinction in Canadian copyright law is essentially the same as that in the United States. The basic notion is that although a copyright may be present in a work it is not present in the underlying ideas.

Case law in Canada

For example in the early case of Deeks v. Wells the Court of Appeal for Ontario blocked an infringement action where an author had provided the manuscript of a book entitled "The Web" to a publisher who later published a work using a similar premise. The court denied the infringement claim employing an analogy based on the Encyclopedia Britannica. The original author of Encyclopedia Britannica could not seek to prevent another author from compiling a chronological history based on known facts for there could be no copyright in the facts themselves or the idea of compiling a chronological history.

Difficulties in applying the idea-expression divide

As a practical matter it can often be difficult for courts to draw the line between a fact and idea on the one hand and expression on the other hand. Learned Hand is often quoted from his decision in Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation, which concerned two plays addressing interracial and inter-religious marriages between Jewish and Irish families, in which he says the following "We assume that the plaintiff's play is altogether original, even to an extent that in fact it is hard to believe. We assume further that, so far as it has been anticipated by earlier plays of which she knew nothing, that fact is immaterial. Still, as we have already said, her copyright did not cover everything that might be drawn from her play; its content went to some extent into the public domain. We have to decide how much, and while we are as aware as any one that the line, whereever it is drawn, will seem arbitrary, that is no excuse for not drawing it; it is a question such as courts must answer in nearly all cases. Whatever may be the difficulties a priori, we have no question on which side of the line this case falls." This quote emphasizes the degree to which courts can have difficulty at the margins in deciding where ideas end and expression begins. For this reason unlike in patent law, the court has to engage in a comparative analysis of the works in question in order to determine the whether infringement is present.

Merger doctrine

Merger doctrine is a simple doctrine in IP law which states that when the expression of an idea can only occur in one or a few different ways or the expression of an idea is a necessary implication of the efficient expression of the idea then the idea merges with the expression and cannot be the subject of a copyright.

Case law in Canada

The status of the merger doctrine in Canada is somewhat unclear. It is clear in the United States from cases like Rosenthal v. Kalpakian(which concerned the infringement of certain bee shaped jewellery that in the United States that there are occasions where the expression of the idea merges with the idea itself such that the expression cannot be the subject of copyright) " that merger doctrine in an integral element of the copyright regime. In Canada the Delrina cases support the existence of a merger doctrine in substance however the actual status of the doctrine as understood in the U.S. is somewhat uncertain.. In Delrina II Justice of the Appeal Morden noted that the U.S. doctrine of merger had been the subject of criticism in earlier Canadian and English caselaw in particular he quoted Justice Jacob in the English case of Ibcos Computer Ltd. v. Barclays Finance Ltd. who said with respect to the American doctrine of merger, "The true position is that where an 'idea' is sufficiently general, then even if the original work embodies it, the mere taking of that idea will not infringe. But if the idea is detailed, then there may be infringement. It is a question of degree" suggesting that the doctrine of merger is inherent in the idea expression dichotomy and does not exist as an official principle of Canadian copyright law. Nonetheless in the same decision Justice Morden stated the following, "The merger notion is a natural corollary of the idea/ expression distinction which, as I have said, is fundamental in copyright law in Canada, England and the United States. Clearly, if there is only one or a very limited number of ways to achieve a particular result in a computer program, to hold that that way or ways are protectable by copyright could give the copyright holder a monopoly on the idea or function itself" suggesting that whatever apprehension the court has about the U.S. formulation of the merger doctrine a functional equivalent exists in Canada.

Justifications for merger doctrine

This doctrine was developed to prevent a copyrightholder from effectively denying other users or creators the use of an idea simply because an idea cannot be expressed in another fashion. A simple example involves a list of recipe ingredients for pancake batter. The expression of the list of ingredients can only be done in a very limited number of ways. As a result the granting copyright over the list would be to deny the use of the idea of pancake batter to other cooks. For this reason it is likely that the list of pancake batter ingredients merges with the expression of the list of ingredients such that no copyright can be present in the list.

Scènes à faire

Is a doctrine closely related to the idea-expression divide.

See Also

• Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation
• Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service
• scènes à faire
• Stock character

References

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:44, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Glad to see you are still here

We will need to improve certain aspects of the article you are working in. Can you provide ISBNs (there is a tool in the edit box that creates all the ref details from this piece of info). Also what do you think about merging to Copyright law of Canada? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:03, 18 October 2011 (UTC)