National Post, Warman discontinue appeals in important copyright appeal

The National Post, followed by Richard Warman today withdrew their respective appeals of the important Federal Court decision in Warman v. Fournier, 2012 FC 803 [1]. The withdrawals occurred just five days before the appeal was set down to be heard before the Federal Court of Appeal. The decision has enormous implications for journalists, bloggers, and online free speech generally.

The surprise move means that Justice Rennie's initial findings stand. The Appellants challenged these, arguing that:

• hyperlinks do not count as 'attribution' (a pre-requisite to the exercise of some fair dealing rights);
• copyright law's limitation period applies to works published on the internet is effectively renewed daily, as the content posted to the Internet is reproduced 'every day' it remains available, leading to never ending potential liability;
• platform hosts are liable for content posted to their sites even before they receive notice from a litigang that the content in question may be infringing; and
• reproducing general excerpts from an original work amounts to taking a "substantial part" of the work when assessing a non-economic claim of infringement.

CIPPIC had intervened in the case and filed a Memorandum of Fact and Law [2] supportive of the holdings of Justice Rennie at the trial level. For more information, see our resource page: https://cippic.ca/copyright/national_post_v_fournier [3]