On June 29, 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, passed third reading in the Senate and received Royal Assent. Although not yet proclaimed into force, this Bill amends the Copyright Act, which had remained largely unchanged since 1997.
The enactment of this bill comes in the wake of several failed attempts to revise the Copyright Act, namely Bills C-60, C-61 and C-32, each of which died on the Order Paper due to the dissolution of Parliament in December 2005, September 2008, and March 2011, respectively.
Bill C-11, which was introduced in the House of Commons on September 29, 2011, adds new provisions to the Copyright Act, in part to align the Copyright Act with a number of international copyright treaties that have been signed by Canada.
The internet is not a law-free zone where anything goes. A recent decision by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Century 21 Canada Limited Partnership v. Rogers Communications Inc., 2011 BCSC 1196, serves to reinforce this fact.
Century 21 and two individual real estate brokers sought an injunction and damages against Zoocasa and its parent Rogers due to Zoocasa’s indexing and “webcrawling” of Century 21’s real estate listing.
Century 21 operated a website featuring its brokers’ property listings. Zoocasa operated a website that indexed property listings from a number of real estate websites and operated as a “vertical” search engine with respect to such listings. In so doing, Zoocasa copied property descriptions and photographs from the Century 21 Website for use on the Zoocasa Website, a violation of Century 21’s website’s Terms of Use.