Teresa Scassa - Blog

On April 24, 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada handed down a decision which at least touches upon the thorny question of what constitutes “personal information”. This question is particularly important to governments that are contemplating the proactive release of government data under commitments to open government. The issue is far from academic, as federal, provincial and municipal governments in Canada have all taken steps in this direction. Indeed, the Ontario government has just signaled…

Ontario’s Divisional Court has decided to certify a class proceeding in Keatley Surveying Ltd. v. Teranet Inc., a case that raises issues about the copyright status of plans of survey that are prepared by surveyors and deposited in provincial land registries. (The decision of the court below refusing to certify the class action was discussed here.) The defendant, Teranet Inc. is the company that runs the province’s electronic land titles system. The class plaintiff argues that individual land surveyors hold copyright in their surveys, and it argues that the defendant Teranet violates those copyrights when it makes electronic copies of those surveys available to others for a fee. The defendant raises several arguments in its defence. These include an argument that copyright in the surveys belongs to the Crown because of the statutory requirement for such surveys. Alternatively, it is argued that copyright is assigned to the Crown through the act of registering the document. Another possibility is that the statutory scheme that governs the registration of a plan of survey creates a process whereby the surveyor consents to the copying of the submitted plan for public purposes. Finally, there is the argument that the electronic land registry system operated by Teranet confers a public benefit such that it would be against public policy to permit surveyors to enforce their copyrights. As noted in a recent posting, these questions regarding the copyright status of documents in public registries are both interesting and important, and arise in other contexts as well.

The Divisional Court was prepared to certify the class proceeding because certain deficiencies identified by the judge at first instance had been corrected in the plaintiff’s revised class certification request. For example, while initially the class had been defined in such a way that membership in the class depended on how the substantive issues would be decided, the revised definition of the class simply includes all land surveyors in Ontario who are authors of a plan of survey found in the electronic database, or who might hold copyright in such a plan as a result of their status as employer of a surveyor, or as an assignee of either the surveyor or his/her employer. The Court of Appeal also found that the other requirements for certification of a class were met.

The Court of Appeal’s decision paves the way for this law suit to proceed – though it remains far from certain that any of the underlying copyright issues will ever ultimately be decided by a court. Nevertheless, should this dispute make its way to court, it may well provide important guidance regarding copyright in documents of all kinds that are filed in public registries for statutory purposes.