Globalive filed its responses to the CRTC in respect of its ownership review and sent heavily redacted copies to interested parties in the proceeding.
It wasn’t surprising that the company would try to maintain confidentiality over much of the information. However, the transmittal email contained language that was unusual.
Most of the time, when I receive copies of a submission, the body of the email will say something like “the attached material was filed today with the CRTC…”
Globalive filed its responses in 6 packages of 2MB each, with a lengthy legalistic cover message on each email. The message had 3 sections:
- the first was a more formal version of “here’s the stuff and some of it is subject to confidentiality claims”;
- the third was an explanation of why there are 6 separate 2MB emails;
- the middle section has a copyright claim that I haven’t seen before.
2. YOUR RIGHT TO USE THESE DOCUMENTS
These documents are provided to you to fulfill a CRTC requirement. Copyright in many of these documents is held by Globalive companies or its investors. Copyright in certain others is held by third parties.
They are provided to you for a direct, limited purpose — so that you may improve the evidentiary record of the proceeding initiated by TNC 2009-429. No one has granted you any right to store or reproduce them for any other purpose. No one has authorized you to store them for longer than is necessary to fulfill this purpose.
The copyright owners will reserve the right to vigorously pursue any unauthorized and, therefore, illegal use of these documents. If you feel that you are authorized to use any of these documents in any way that exceeds the use described above, or wish to use those in which Globalive or its investors holds rights for some other purpose, contact us at the e-mail address above.
Now, I’ll let the lawyers out there determine what all this means. Does “any unauthorized” really translate to “therefore, illegal”?
In any case, I found it interesting that the copyright claim appears in the email, but not in the body of the attachments.
In a day or so, all the attachments will be available on the CRTC website, without the email message. I don’t know how someone downloading the material from the CRTC’s website is supposed to know that Globalive’s lawyers consider it to be illegal to store the material just for your own reference purposes.
Keep in mind that the CRTC set out in the original Public Notice [right in paragraph 2] that the reason Globalive is going through this process was to help others understand the structure to use as a precedent for other corporate arrangements:
The Commission determined that a Type 4 review would be conducted where an ownership and governance structure is of a complex or novel nature, such that in the Commission’s view its determination would hold precedential value to industry players and the general public, …
As such, it is unclear that Globalive can really limit the purpose of the document retention or how the material.
Comments?
Update [August 14, 12:30 pm]
Blake’s has filed a letter with McCarthy’s [counsel to Globalive] saying “We intend to respect any copyrights that your clients, or any other party in this proceeding, may assert. However please me advised that we will not be governed by any other restrictions which your letter purports to impose which are beyond the restrictions established under Canadian law”.
Under Copyright law, "unauthorized" is definitely NOT equivalent to "illegal". The Copyright Act includes a number of exceptions that allows someone to use a copyrighted work without the author's permission. See sections 29-33 of the Copyright Act. One such exception is for "criticism or review", so I don't think you need to worry about getting sued for your reproduction of McCarthy's copyright language in your blog post!!!
This reminds me of book publishers and how they used to always claim many more rights than they owned on the first page.
It also reminds me of many people's email signatures which claim privilege of some type. I don't know how a postscript notice can apply to the earlier text–I might not read it all before forwarding a copy of my personal correspondence to a friend / blog site.