While most of the major entertainment industry companies wage war against BitTorrent sites, the Songwriters Association of Canada prefers to embrace file-sharing. Speaking with TorrentFreak, vice president Jean-Robert Bisaillon says that the Internet has revived the music business. Sharing music is part of people’s nature and the songwriters want to legalize file-sharing, while compensating the artists whose works are shared.
The United States is something of an outlier in the world when it comes to hate speech. Whereas laws prohibiting hate speech in the U.S. are simply unconstitutional (barring the various unprotected exceptions like obscenity, incitement, etc.), the m…
After targeting tens of thousands of U.S. Internet users alleged to have downloaded and shared the Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker, the movie’s makers have expanded their settlement business into new territory. Three Canadian ISPs have now been ordered by a court to hand over the personal details of their subscribers to Voltage Pictures.
Source: Hurt Locker Lawsuits Hit Canada, ISPs Ordered To Reveal BitTorrent Users
A few months ago 21-year old Travis McCrea participated in the Canadian federal elections as candidate for the Pirate Party in Vancouver Centre. Aside from his political ambitions, McCrea also described himself as an entrepreneur. As with his political views, his business ventures are also focused on file-sharing related ideas, and most recently he started a torrent site to promote the distribution of movies.
Together with their partners at the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the RIAA has submitted their ‘piracy watchlist’ recommendations to the Office of the US Trade Representative. Canada and Spain are listed as two piracy havens that require urgent attention from the US Government, even though the latter just adopted a US inspired anti-piracy law.
A group of 26 major record labels have sued the owner of Canadian BitTorrent site isoHunt for allegedly facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Through this lawsuit the labels hope to shut down the isoHunt website while receiving over 4 million dollars in punitive damages to compensate for their claimed losses.
In 2005 there was C-60, in 2008 it was C-61, and now in 2010 it’s C-32. As we reported a month ago, a new Bill was about to be rammed through Canada’s Parliament, and on Wednesday it was announced. It is, like its two predecessors, mostly a collection of stricter enforcement rules with an occasional benefit to consumers thrown in, almost as an afterthought.
In the wake of recent reports exposing the activities of former MP Rahim Jaffer, lobbying has been the talk of Ottawa for the past month. The incident has had an immediate impact on lobbying regulations, with the Conservatives and Liberals jostling over who can introduce tougher disclosure measures. The changes may plug a few loopholes, yet the reality is that lobbying efforts are not always the subject of secretive meetings with high-level officials.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) considers the intensive lobbying effort on promised intellectual property reform. In recent weeks, those efforts have escalated dramatically, with most activities taking place in plain view. Scarcely a week goes by without a major event occurring – last week it was a reception sponsored by the Canadian Private Copying Collective, the week before an event hosted by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, and the week before that the Juno Awards attended by several cabinet ministers and MPs.
Even more open is the public campaign designed to persuade Canadians that their country is a piracy haven. Late last month, the IFPI, which represents the global recording industry, released its annual Recording Industry in Numbers report that tracks global record sales. The report targeted two countries – Canada and Spain – for declining sales and linked those declines to copyright law. Not coincidentally, both countries are currently working on legal reforms.
The IFPI release succeeded in generating attention, but a closer look reveals that it put the spotlight on the wrong country. Canadian sales declined 7.4 per cent last year. That was bad news, but nearly identical to the global average of 7.2 per cent. Moreover, the declines were far larger in both the United States (10.7 per cent) and Japan (10.8 per cent), yet neither of those countries was described in similarly negative terms.
The same week the U.S. government chimed in with its annual Special 301 report. Often described as the global piracy list, the U.S. chose to lump Canada together with countries such as China and Russia as allegedly among the world's worst intellectual property offenders.
Rather than embarrassing Canadians, the list itself is increasingly viewed as the embarrassment. This year's report ignored a submission from the world's largest technology and Internet companies (including Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Fujitsu, AMD, eBay, Intuit, Oracle, and Yahoo), which argued that it is completely inappropriate to place Canada on the list.
Moreover, the data suggests Canada is a leader, not a laggard. According to the software industry's own piracy numbers, Canada's piracy rate is declining and is dramatically lower than any other country on the priority watch list. In fact, the Business Software Alliance has characterized Canada as a "low piracy country."
The news is similar with respect to movie piracy, where the motion picture industry has acknowledged that incidents of illegal camcording have dropped in Canada as the country is one of few in the world with criminal convictions for such activities.
The government has taken further action in recent months to combat infringement. Although a new copyright bill is still a few weeks away, Canada recently amended its Proceeds of Crime regulations by removing the Copyright Act from the list. Copyright lobby groups had requested the change to facilitate legal action against infringers.
While there remains further room for improvement, claims that Canada is a piracy haven are based largely on fiction rather than fact. But with a major bill only weeks away, this form of lobbying seems certain to continue.
Following pressure from the US Government, Canada is preparing to ram through a revamped copyright bill that will have disastrous consequences for consumers. The Government is hereby ignoring the public consultation held last year, where many Canadians spoke out against harsher copyright legislation.
With the Canada – European Union summit underway this week, the European Parliament has just passed a resolution that calls on Canada to support even greater ACTA transparency and to shift the negotiations to an international organization such as WIPO. The full paragraph within the resolution states that the European Parliament:
Hopes that Canada will fully support the EU's request to open up the ACTA negotiations to public scrutiny, as it requested in its resolution of 10 March 2010, and to have those negotiations conducted under the auspices of an international organisation, the most suitable being WIPO;
In the aftermath of its success in promoting release of the ACTA draft text, it is interesting to see the European Parliament becoming increasingly vocal about the ACTA negotiations. Canada has remained generally silent on these issues and the EP resolution may help coax out a response.