Copyright

 

 

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🇨🇦 Copyright Basics in Canada

Canada’s copyright law is governed by the Copyright Act. Here are the essentials:

• Automatic Protection: Copyright applies automatically to original literary works (like biographies) once they’re fixed in a tangible form—no registration required.
• Duration: Protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years after death.
• Rights Granted: The author has exclusive rights to reproduce, publish, perform, or adapt the work.
• Moral Rights: These include the right to be credited and to object to distortions or modifications that harm the author's reputation.

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✍️ Biography Writing: Legal Considerations

Writing about someone’s life—especially if they’re still alive—adds a few layers of complexity:

1. Copyright of Source Material

• You can’t copy large portions of someone else’s copyrighted work (e.g., books, articles, interviews) without permission.
• Fair dealing may allow limited use for purposes like criticism, review, or news reporting, but it’s narrow and context-dependent.

2. Public Domain & Facts

• Facts aren’t copyrighted—you’re free to write about someone’s life events.
• However, how those facts are expressed (e.g., in another biography) is protected.

3. Privacy & Defamation

• If the subject is living, you must be careful not to invade their privacy or make defamatory claims.
• Consent isn’t legally required to write a biography, but it helps avoid legal trouble.

4. Personality Rights

• Canada recognizes personality rights, especially in commercial contexts. Using someone’s name or likeness for promotion may require permission.

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🧠 Pro Tips for Biographers

• Use multiple sources and cite them properly.
• Avoid plagiarism—even paraphrasing too closely can be risky.
• Consider legal review if your subject is high-profile or controversial.

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"How To Read A Book"

 "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler is a classic guide to reading comprehension and critical thinking. The book is divided into four parts:

1. The Dimensions of Reading: Adler introduces the different levels of reading, from elementary to syntopical, and explains how to approach each level.

2. The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading: This section focuses on how to read a book analytically, including how to identify the author's main arguments and evaluate their validity.

3. Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter: Adler discusses how to read different types of literature, such as fiction, poetry, history, and science, and provides specific strategies for each genre.

4. The Ultimate Goals of Reading: The final section explores the ultimate goals of reading, such as gaining knowledge, understanding complex ideas, and developing critical thinking skills.

 This section delves into the deeper purposes of reading beyond just understanding the text. Here are the key points:

1. Gaining Knowledge: Adler emphasizes that one of the primary goals of reading is to acquire knowledge. This involves not just gathering information but also understanding and integrating it into your existing knowledge base.

2. Understanding Complex Ideas: Reading helps in grasping complex and abstract ideas. Adler encourages readers to engage with challenging texts to expand their intellectual horizons.

3. Developing Critical Thinking Skills: Reading critically involves questioning the author's arguments, evaluating evidence, and forming your own opinions. This process enhances your analytical and critical thinking abilities.

4. Personal Growth and Enlightenment: Adler believes that reading can lead to personal growth and enlightenment. By exposing yourself to diverse perspectives and ideas, you can develop a more nuanced understanding of the world and your place in it.

5. Lifelong Learning: Finally, Adler advocates for reading as a lifelong pursuit. He argues that continuous reading and learning are essential for personal and intellectual development.

Overall, Part 4 of the book encourages readers to approach reading as a meaningful and transformative activity that goes beyond mere entertainment or information gathering.

Overall, the book emphasizes the importance of active reading and provides practical techniques for improving reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Syntopical Reading

   The levels of reading 

(By Leticia Mooney, an Australian author)

There are actually 4 levels of reading. The one that you’re taught in school, is 

Level 1. That’s when you can read a page and make sense of it. I call it ‘basic’ reading; others call it ‘elementary’ reading. It doesn’t matter whether you completed high school or not, the schooling system doesn’t get you beyond basic reading.

Level 2 is Inspectional Reading. If you’re lucky, you went to a high school that taught you how to ask questions of any kind of text, and how to make a book your own. Inspectional reading is a style of reading where you ‘inspect it: You look at all the parts, read the headings and the first sentences, and generally familiarise yourself with the work. If you do do this type of reading, it’s much more likely that you ‘found it’, rather than were ‘taught’ it.  

Level 3 is when you become a Demanding Reader. As a demanding reader, you exert effort. You only use this level of reading from texts from which you want to profit (generally speaking). It requires that you ask particular questions of a text, take notes in a particular way, and make the book your own.

Level 4 is the highest and most demanding type of reading of all: Syntopic Reading. When you’re reading at the Syntopic level, you’re working to synthesise material across a discipline. Syntopic reading itself has five levels, requires a different approach to inspection, and is the point at which you make the authors work for you rather than you interpreting them.

 Syntopic Reading: How to do it

 Syntopical reading has two phases

Phase 1 is Preparation; Phase 2 is Reading.

Preparation phase

During the preparation phase, you compile a bibliography. It requires a deep survey of the field, and you listing them all for yourself in some fashion. Then, you need to understand which books from that list are not just going to be relevant to you, but are both pertinent and fitting.

Reading phase

You can “just read” them. But what’s the point? You’re just doing basic reading if you just read them.

 Syntopical reading is much deeper than this. Here’s how it works:

1. Inspect them to find the most relevant passages

2. Construct a neutral terminology that you will use. Don’t just pick up the terms that the authors use. This forces the authors to come to terms with you and your goals.

3. Create a set of neutral propositions, which is a list of questions that the authors need to answer.

4. Spend time defining the issues in the works, by listing all major and minor issues that you identify, on both sides of the subject. You have to interpret the authors, not just copy out what they say. The point is to analyse the work yourself and understand the author’s key positioning, and sometimes that’s not explicit.

5. Conduct an analysis of the issue by ordering the questions in such a way as to throw the most light onto the subject as possible.

One of the critical problems, of course, is knowing where to start. If you have access to a syntopicon, like Great Books of the Western World, great! However, even if you do have something like that, there’s a good chance that the world has moved on since it was published.

Nevertheless, if you do have access to a syntopicon, that’s an excellent gateway.

The point of syntopic reading is to come to terms with an entire field, issue, argument, or discipline, for whatever purpose you are chasing. It’s important to keep direct quotes from the authors as evidence for your issues identification, and from the questions that they answer, so that you can demonstrate enough distance; this is what Mortimer Adler terms ‘dialectical detachment’.

In Summary

Syntopical reading is the most demanding level of all four levels of reading. It enables you to force authors to come to terms with your subject, question, argument, or issue. Its benefits are not just academic; once you know how to deploy syntopical reading, you will know how to assess any issue, in any text (not just in books), and to be able to construct a narrative out of a field with relatively little effort. In so doing, you grow not just your general knowledge, but also your mind.

Bibliomaniacs love this book

                                                       

 Rob Kaplan , Harold Rabinowitz 

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours."

-- J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

"I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading." -- Thomas B. Macaulay, Life (1876)

The love of books, and the desire to speak and write of that love, are as old as books themselves. In fact, they are even older than printed books. "All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books," wrote Richard de Bury in The Philobiblon (The Love of Books), which was completed in 1345, more than a hundred years before Gutenberg printed his first Bible.

And in every generation since de Bury's there have been new voices expressing the pleasures they take in books and reading. Speaking of Books contains hundreds of the best of those expressions -- entertaining and thought-provoking quotations about the reading and enjoyment of -- not to mention obsession with -- books. The collection includes examples of bibliophilia that range across the centuries and around the globe, from ancient Chinese proverbs to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from the Bible to Woody Allen, from Jane Austen to Mark Twain, and from William Shakespeare to J. D. Salinger.

Filled with insight, wisdom, and humor, Speaking of Books will be read with pleasure by everyone who believes, as Thomas Carlyle did, that "of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things called books."

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

-- Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, August 7, 1991

"It was books that taught me that the things that torment me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." -- James Baldwin, in the New York Times, January 1, 1964

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!" -- Henry Ward

Beecher, Star Papers; or, Experiences of Art and Nature (1855)

"What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?" -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Over the Teacups (1891)

"I took a speed-reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia." -- Woody Allen, in a letter by Phyllis Mindell to the New York Times, September 3, 1995

"You may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it." -- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)

"Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like beauty itself, is a joy for ever." -- Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930)