The mood of the event was decidedly celebratory, with friends, family, students, and colleagues alike partaking in food, beverages, and conversation in honour of Prof. Chapdelaine’s accomplishment. Bob Tarantino kicked the event off by contextualizing Prof. Chapdelaine’s work within the copyright user rights discussion, which has been of growing importance in the IP community since the Supreme Court of Canada’s pronouncement in – adopting the language of Prof. – that exceptions to copyright infringement are best understood as users’ rights. Mr. Tarantino noted that Prof. Chapdelaine’s book provides an answer to the question, what are user rights with respect to copyright, and thus Prof. Chapdelaine’s new book is a valuable resource for user rights critics, advocates, and fence-sitters alike.

Prof. Chapdelaine commenced her talk by thanking her friends, family, and colleagues for their support throughout her career. Prof. Chapdelaine also noted the influence her diverse background has had on her work; she having spent years in private practice in Montreal as well as in-house counsel for Bell Media and BCE Inc, and holding an LLB and BCL from McGill Universty, an LLM from KU Leuven Faculty of Law in Belgium, and a PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School.

In her book, Prof. Chapdelaine sets out to define what copyright user rights actually entail – particularly in a society where the modes of cultural consumption are increasingly dematerialized and digitized. In other words, Prof. Chapdelaine’s work examines how Western legal traditions can (and should) conceptualize and uphold copyright user rights as society’s modes of consumption move away from ownership of tangibles (e.g. books, CDs, etc.) and towards access to intangibles (e.g. streaming, e-books, etc.)?

In the Canadian legal context, the logical extension of the preceding question is: how can and should the legislature and judiciary give effect to the Supreme Court of Canada’s pronouncement in , whilst still upholding the balance between the public interest and the rights of authors expounded by the Supreme Court in ? Prof. Chapdelaine also sets out to answer the corollary question: if exceptions to copyright infringement are user rights, what obligations are imposed on copyright owners by the existence of such rights?

In answering all of the above questions, Prof. Chapdelaine adopts a theoretical framework grounded in copyright law but informed by property, contract, and consumer law, and applies it to practical situations, resulting in a comprehensive perspective on copyright user rights. In so doing, Prof. Chapdelaine problematizes the dichotomies of tangible/intangible works, and copyright owner/user in attempts to show how misunderstandings of such dichotomies influence the various arguments for and against copyright user rights.

If you find the above questions and conceptions intriguing than I suggest you get yourself a copy of Prof. Chapdelaine’s new book – I know I sure will!

Stephen Cooley is an IPilogue Editor and a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

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Copyright law, as conventionally understood, serves the public interest by regulating the production and dissemination of works of authorship, though it recognizes that the requirements of the public interest are in tension. Incentives for creation must be provided, but protections granted authors must not prevent the fruits of creativity and knowledge from spreading. Copyright law, therefore, should balance the needs of creators and users—or so the theory goes.

Challenging this widely accepted view, disentangles copyright theory from its focus on the economic value of an authored work as a commodity or piece of property. In his analysis of copyright doctrine, Abraham Drassinower frames an author’s work as a communicative act and asserts that copyright infringement is best understood as an unauthorized appropriation of another person’s speech. According to this interpretation, copyright doctrine does not guarantee an author’s absolute rights over a work but only such rights as are consistent with both the nature of the work as speech and with the structure of the dialogue in which it participates. The rights protecting works of authorship are confined to communicative uses of the work and to uses consistent with the communicative rights of others—for example, unauthorized reproduction of a work is lawful when responding to the work requires its reproduction.

offers a new way to interpret and criticize existing copyright law and to think about the relation between copyright and digital technology as well as broader juridical, social, and cultural concerns.

“This book is the first in two decades to take a really fresh and illuminating methodological look at an intellectual-property topic.”
—Wendy J. Gordon, Boston University School of Law

“The most original and provocative philosophical treatment of copyright law in decades, if not centuries.”
—Barton Beebe, New 91��ɫ School of Law

Abraham Drassinower is Chair in the Legal, Ethical, and Cultural Implications of Technological Innovation at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

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