Copyright is never just copyright

flickr - Stephen Rees

I have now landed in Canada in my new position at McMaster University, and it wasn’t four hours into my first day where I thought, oh yes, must make a note to educate myself on the details of Canadian copyright law. As I pounded into my students’ heads in Germany, copyright is one of the areas that globalization has passed over (surely for better and worse), and remains a staunchly idiosyncratic domain of nation states. What I know about U.S. and German copyright law gives me a starting point, but it would be foolish to think that Canada applies the same rules. What I can be sure of, however, is that media companies have twisted copyright regulations to their benefit in recent years. That is universal.

On the personal side, I have already discovered that Netflix in Canada is a very different beast than in the U.S. in terms of available content, so I am less than inspired. Canadian readers: are there native alternatives that offer more content?