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June 13, 2008 It received praise from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the music and film industries, and other business groups, but Jim Prentice’s new copyright legislation, which he tabled this week in the House of Commons, is getting the thumbs down from musicians, privacy advocates and consumer groups. “Critics say the new legislation too closely resembles the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been criticized as too stacked against consumers in favour of rights holders such as the movie and recording industries,” wrote the Globe and Mail today. “They fear it could force ordinary Canadians to pay thousands of dollars in penalties for copying their own legally purchased music to CDs or uploading videos to sharing sites such as YouTube.” Among those critics is Brendan Canning, a member of the Canadian Music Creators Coalition and a co-founder of the band Broken Social Scene, who told the Globe: “The question is, who gains from this bill? It's not musicians. Musicians don't need lawsuits. ... What we do need is a government that is willing to sit down with all the stakeholders and craft a balanced copyright policy for Canada that will not repeat the mistakes made in the United States.” As University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist has been saying for some time, this new legislation is not the product of a balanced public consultation but probably “Born in the U.S.A.?”: “The concern expressed by tens of thousands of Canadians is that calls for balance have not been heard, drowned out by the vocal lobbying from the U.S. and well-connected lobby groups,” wrote Geist in a February blog entry. “The Conservative government campaigned in 2006 on a platform of government accountability and transparency to put an end to these forms of secretive influence. If the copyright bill proceeds without addressing public concerns and before conducting the promised House of Commons review of the WIPO Treaties, Canadians will be left to ask whether Prentice's plan is a made-in-Canada solution or, as it appears, a bill that was born in the U.S.A.” The reform legislation, which could die when Parliament sits for the summer, includes new fines for downloading and uploading copyrighted material and for tampering with corporate anti-theft devices that, in Canada (at least for now), impede the legal act of making personal copies of digital material. According to CTV: “The main aim of the Federal legislation appears to be discouraging illegal downloading and sharing. Ottawa will try to achieve that goal with a fine of $500 for downloading music or movies illegally. The penalties are much more severe for uploading music or movies to a website or hacking a digital lock. That penalty would be $20,000.” The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which has been lobbying the Canadian government to adopt U.S. copyright practices through the Security and Prosperity Partnership, said in a press release that the Copyright Act amendments “are part of a broader strategy for strengthening Canada’s economic competitiveness through better protection of intellectual property rights. “As a relatively small economy that is heavily dependent on knowledge-based industries, Canada has a vital interest in working with our trading partners to prevent counterfeiting and piracy, and in particular should take a leadership role in negotiating a multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).” The CCCE houses the Canadian section of the North American Competitiveness Council, whose recommendations on copyright reform in reports to SPP leaders have apparently been adopted wholesale by the Canadian government. Previous posts on this subject: Canada ducks for cover on copyright; plans to sign ACTA without parliamentary approval
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