United States of America

Canada

Copyright and Related Rights

5. In Section 2 of the Copyright Act, “cinematograph” is defined to exclude, for purposes of Section 11.1 of that Act, “works where the arrangement or acting form or the combination of incidents represented give the work an original character”. Please explain the meaning of this definition and the relationship of these works to Section 11.1, which appears to relate to duration.

The rationale for the definition of "cinematograph" in Section 2 is to permit one copyright term (i.e. life plus fifty) for "scripted" cinematographic works and another copyright term (i.e. fifty years from the end of the calendar year of publication) for "unscripted" cinematographic works, e.g., most news footage and home videos.