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Copyright

COPYRIGHT: It is legal to show DVDs out-of-region under current Canadian law (as of Fall 2004). Region codes have no legal force in Canada. They possibly might have some legal force in the USA under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is illegal to show any copyrighted material without a license for public performance, and that is true regardless of whether the item has been licensed for North American distribution or not, and regardless of whether it was subtitled by fans or professionals. It is illegal to reproduce copyrighted video (for instance, by Internet filesharing) without permission from the copyright holders, and that is true regardless of its North American licensing status. As a result, the popular phrase “legal fansub” for a fansub of a show that isn’t yet licensed in North America, is a misnomer - such materials are almost always illegal.

It is generally legal in Canada to copy music - only music, not video nor non-musical audio material - for personal use, because of the “blank media levy” paid on recordable media; that is true even for Internet downloading (under the controversial Federal Court decision in BMG v. Doe, March 2004 - be warned, that decision is under appeal as of late 2004, and may not stand), even for material originating outside Canada, and even for copying onto media like computer hard drives for which the blank levy was not actually paid. There are some subtleties and grey areas in this issue but they’re beyond the scope.

Except in the case of the blank media levy music thing, the fact that we are non-commercial or non-profit does NOT make a difference to legality of copying. The academic “fair dealing” exception applies to using quotes in your book report, and similar; it does NOT apply to wholesale copying of entire works just because you want to watch them. Being non-commercial only reduces the amount of damages that a copyright holder could claim against us; it does not make our activities legal. See also Non-profit.

Most of our shows are technically against copyright law, but that is because of the public-performance issue, NOT because of region code or North American licensing issues. We have been granted blanket licenses from a few North American distributors allowing us to show their material. However, our paperwork documenting that is fragmentary. What there is of it, is in the accordion file in the office. We are sometimes sent material by North American distributors as part of their promotional programs (for instance, Anime Addict) and they implicitly or even explicitly give us licenses to show that material when they send it to us.

North American distributors generally don’t care about what we and clubs like ours do. They are extremely unlikely to sue us. Criminal copyright infringement is not an issue for us, only civil, and so it basically comes down to “what we do is legal until we get sued for it”. Japanese distributors don’t care about anything that happens in North America and refuse to answer our mail, even if we write to them in Japanese. As a result, it is seldom possible to get permission, nor even a denial of permission, for shows only available through Japan. The main reason for concern about public-performance licenses is because of external agencies (A/V and FEDS) that may attempt to place requirements on us.

A policy decision reached by the assemblage at the end of Winter 2006 as protection against potential blowback from A/V following the [[WATCON?]] scandal (see also: Brett Canavan) has made it so that CTRL-A Showings are now, for the large part, entirely legal. The policy decision was to “attain permissions for titles before we show them” as has been largely successful, with us able to (except in a few miscommunication cases) maintain a 100% Permissions Gained status. Thus far it’s only prevented us from showing

Indirectly, it has negatively weighted any R2 title suggested. This is nominally okay as it only took about a year for the most popular series to get licensed, but since the ailments of the anime industry whose symptoms really started to be noticed in [[Summer_2007?]] with the collapse of Geneon’s DVD division in North America, things might be slowing down. Suggestions have been once again raised about ammending the policy to allow for showing R2s so long as we’ve sought permissions and not been outright refused, but the trump card in any of those arguments is “If we get caught, A/V and FedS? will (likely) drop us like a tonne of bricks, and there goes our ability to book rooms”