A couple of weeks I blogged about Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda's fundraising during the last federal election. Days before the vote, as the Conservative momentum made her a likely Cabinet minister, Oda accepted contributions from many in the copyright lobby including Universal Music (tied for her third largest external […]
Post Tagged with: "copyright"
Canadian Gov’t Pays Copyright Lobby to Lobby
While the Harper government last week passed accountability legislation in the House of Commons, my weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) suggests that another form of lobbying exists that requires closer scrutiny – lobbying that is financed by the government itself. According to government documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, last fall the Ministry of Canadian Heritage entered into a multi-year agreement with the Creators' Rights Alliance, a national coalition of artists groups and copyright collectives with members both small (the League of Canadian Poets) and large (SOCAN and Access Copyright). The CRA has eight objectives, which notably include "to ensure that government policy and legislation recognize that copyright is fundamentally about the rights of creators" and "to ensure that international treaties and obligations to which Canada is signatory provide the strongest possible protection for the rights of creators."
The Canadian Heritage – CRA agreement, which could run until 2008 at a total cost of nearly $400,000, appears to be designed primarily to enable the CRA to lobby the government on copyright reform. In return for $125,000 annually, the CRA provides the Ministry with its views on copyright in the form of comments, analysis or research papers (other deliverables include a policy conference, website communications, and a regular newsletter).
The contract raises several issues.
Canadian Digital Security Companies Warn Against Anti-Circumvention Laws
Many of Canada's leading digital security companies, including Third Brigade, Certicom, VE Networks, and Borderware Technologies, have issued a public letter to Ministers Bernier and Oda on copyright reform. The letter, signed by Brian O'Higgins (widely regarded as a world leader in authentication and digital security issues as a founder […]
European Commissioner Calls for Copyright Balance
Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internet Market and Services, has issued his annual policy strategy in which he notes that "protection of intellectual property and copyright also raises important questions of their effect on consumers" and calls for balance in that respect.
Copyright and Politics
IHT carries an interesting article on the growing political pressure on politicians to adopt a balanced approach to copyright reform It focuses on the situation in Sweden and France, where politicians from many parties are recognizing the political force of thousands of downloaders who incidentally also vote. In Canada, those […]
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