Pity those who are trying to impose law and order in the wild, wild web.

Copyright holders clamp down on sites engaged in trading of owned material, only to see more buzzing around.

Movie, TV and music executives find their products hitting the internet for free and many fear their bottom lines will drop as a result.

In music, the industry has welcomed the arrival of iTunes as a legitimate business model, but decries sites like Russian-based allofmp3.com, which sells entire albums for a dollar and tracks for pennies.

Music and TV companies have signed deals with YouTube, the popular video-sharing website that was purchased by Google, to protect their content, but there are plenty of sites out there that are being hit with lawsuits.

For example, Universal Music Group says it's suing video-sharing sites Bolt.com and Grouper for copyright violations.

Politicians are trying to come up with a new set of laws that will govern ownership of content in a medium that is often outside their jurisdiction.

MPs are eagerly awaiting a revamping of the Copyright Act, expected this fall.

Meanwhile, there are calls from Corporate Canada for reforms. Telus chief executive officer Darren Entwistle said in October 2006 that the time has come for "regulatory revolution in Canada."

So what about copyright and the internet?

CBC.ca spoke to Professor Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa, an expert on the internet and technology issues. We asked him about a recent Supreme Court ruling that handed freelancers a partial victory over their work housed in electronic databases. We also asked him about the state of copyright in the digital age.

Q: What do you think of the Supreme Court ruling on a case that was launched before the internet came of age?

Geist: In some ways, I think for the freelancers involved, obviously 10 years of hard slogging, a sense of vindication they won. I think from a practical perspective today, most publishers have contracts that address these issues. I'm not certain it has an enormous commercial effect, because frankly since this issue came to people's attention a number of years ago, through contract they were able to address some of the issues the court was dealing with.

At a broader level though, the court is still clearly grapping with copyright-related issues and you get some pretty interesting perspectives on the most important issue with respect to copyright law.

Q: What are those issues?

Geist: You certainly have the perspective of the majority of judges, they are obviously very concerned in ensuring the freelancers were paid for their work and that's where their emphasis lie, but this was a 5-4 decision. When you get the four minority judges, you find that interestingly they see it as a case between two copyright holders, on one hand the newspapers, who have a copyright on the compilation, and the authors who wrote the works that form the compilation. And they argue that one of the real concerns is one of the practical effects of the decision and that the public might ultimately lose out as much of the historical record might be lost if the court ruled the way that it did.

Q: The judges in the minority mentioned the public. How significant is this?

Geist: It's very significant. It highlights a shift that's been taking place within the Supreme Court within the last five years in that the court clearly signalled that copyright is about a balance between creators on the one hand, users on the other. But more importantly, it's about serving the public interest. The public interest is served by ensuring that authors are compensated and also served by [ensuring] appropriate access. And here you had a number of judges citing a potential loss of access as one of their prime concerns.

Q: Do you think in this day and age, with the internet becoming what it is, that the notion of copyright should be rethought?

Geist: Everything is copyright. Everything that you write is protected copyright. The internet has proven to be a remarkable place for access to new content and for creators the ability to disseminate that content and find new audiences that previously didn't exist. I think the copyright law has proven itself to be remarkably resilient in dealing with such issues.

The government is currently contemplating reforms and the reforms in many ways are wrong-headed. They are moving us towards an environment that will limit access and will limit some of the abilities to take advantage of this new medium.

Q: Is there an example you can cite?

Geist: The government is pursuing what's known as anti-circumvention legislation, which encourages the use of technology to lock down content. There are countries that have adopted that, most notably the United States. There has been what people describe as unintended consequences, a real negative factor with respect to things like privacy and security. From a Canadian perspective, not only is the legislation unnecessary but it may indeed be harmful.

With blogs becoming popular on the internet, people are using them to point to other articles, or even to lift portions of other people's work. Does copyright protect work online?

Geist: I think it's protected and if it's not, it ought to be protected. Copyright law is very clear about the ability to use work fairly — "fair dealing" in this country, "fair use" in the United States — certainly merely linking to content ought not to raise any sort of copyright concerns. Publishing excerpted content of work should also not raise significant concerns. Where there are wholesale copying of full articles, there are really two questions that have to be asked and that is: 'Is the licence that the author has used one that would permit that kind of copying?' and increasingly we find that it is in many, many blogs and other online sources use creative commons licensing, which does permit the non-commercial use typically with attribution with work.

When there are full articles copied, the question becomes: 'Well, is it something that's permitted?' and in many cases it is and then of course there are attribution issues that run outside copyright but are important issues nevertheless to ensure the person is appropriately credited.

Q: You have your own site and if you do a search on your name, you'll find your pieces on other sites. What do you think about that?

Geist: I use a creative commons licence and I encourage people to use it so long as they do it with attribution. I think people on the internet increase the public's understanding on how we build upon prior knowledge and prior work. Think of a site like Wikipedia, a collaborative effort which has become an indispensable source for so many on the internet, where it isn't copyright that's behind that. It's creativity, it's people's desire and willingness to create but it's also premised on the ability to build upon what others have been doing.

When I look at my own work, I'm very happy for people to build upon that work. In fact, I've put some of that in 'wiki'-style and encourage people to add to it. If someone were to take my work and call it their own with attribution, that would cause concerns.

Q: What about fair use, or using bits of copyright material in your own work?

Geist: In Canada, it's "fair dealing" as opposed to "fair use" and I think that in some ways that if the government is going to be looking at things that ought to be changed or improved upon, that's one area it ought to be thinking about. The Supreme Court of Canada in recent years has interpreted the fair dealing provision in a manner that it has to be interpreted very broadly and liberally — it believes it's very important and they see it as a user right that stands on the other side of the creator right. But there are still some elements within the way the statute is drafted that is rather confining. We would do well to expand the fair dealing provision so it wasn't solely limited to research, private study and criticism but could be used in a broader manner where appropriate.

Q: Tell us a bit about YouTube and the implications video has for copyright.

Geist: YouTube is fascinating. First off, it seems to be that there's a huge amount of YouTube content that is authorized user-generated content; from the looks of what's the most popular content on YouTube, it's invariably the user-generated stuff that doesn't raise these concerns. But it's undeniable that there's an awful lot of content on there that is copyright.

I think the fact that you had several of YouTube's biggest critics reach agreements with YouTube just before the [Google] deal in which they are willing to try to negotiate and share in the ad revenue highlights the fact that there is a growing recognition that YouTube isn't particularly competitive of what broadcasters or music companies offer [and] in fact enhances the value of their work.

So if there's a way to share in the revenue that YouTube generated off this work, then it sounds like a win-win-win for everyone, the public has better access, the sites can help facilitate that access and those who create the work in the first place can benefit from additional revenue sources.

Q: We weren't having this same conversation about services like Napster. Have things changed since then or is video a different medium?

Geist: I make the argument that a number of things have changed. One is that internet advertising is now seen as a [more] viable business model than perhaps it was a number of years ago, but more than that I think the recording industry perspectives that peer-to-peer was competitive may be changing. While there may have been some reduction in sales for some artists, the notion that this is attributable to peer-to-peer is easily challenged by any number of factors.

In fact, peer-to-peer and the internet more generally has been responsible for a great number of music successes. It may well be that certain industries have feared the loss of control, and new models in the late 1990s, they are somewhat fearful but they perhaps recognize that they have to get in the game.

Q: Copyright reform looks to be on the horizon in Canada. What should we be looking out for from the government?

Geist: We should be looking first and foremost for the prospect of what may be a real backward step with respect to copyright and in terms of copyright legislation. My view is we ought to be embracing the potential the internet provides and the government in many respects needs to get out of the way. We've got the copyright laws that already deal with these issues. There are certainly some groups that are seeking to entrench some outdated business models and are seeking government protection to do that through legislation. Canadians I think increasingly need to recognize that so many of the benefits that they are realizing with respect to the internet and new technologies could be jeopardized by the some of the proposed copyright reforms that we may see later this fall.

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