NDP MP Charlie Angus yesterday presented a petition focused on TPMs to the House of Commons. The petitioners call upon Parliament to "prohibit the application of a technical protection measure to a device without the informed consent of the owner of the device and to prohibit the conditioning of the […]
Fair Dealing by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dRkXwP
Copyright
“Counterfeiting Can Kill”
The Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security held a hearing this morning on counterfeit goods. The panel was well stacked, featuring the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, and the CRIA. Given that composition, the resulting comments will come as little surprise – a Chamber of Commerce representative professed embarrassment over Canada's IP laws, the CACN representatives passed around an extension cord without sufficent grounding while asserting that "fatalities are inevitable" and that IP enforcement is a "lost cause" in Canada. A CACN lawyer noted the great success of educating six and seven year-olds about counterfeit toys that do not contain a tag indicating that they are made of new materials. Graham Henderson indicated that it was about "jobs, jobs, jobs" and that Kenya provides a model for addressing IP issues (though he neglected to mention that like Canada, Kenya has signed, but not ratified, the WIPO Internet treaties).
The panelists all claimed that Canada's IP enforcement system is outdated and thus requires significant new resources and legislative change. There was also considerable emphasis on creating a Canadian IP enforcement infrastructure, with Henderson calling for the creation of an IP Crime Task Force and IP Co-ordination Councils at the federal and provincial levels.
The committee was incredibly receptive to this message.
Old P2P Headline, New P2P Approach
Earlier this week the National Post ran a story titled Video Theft May Rise in Canada. The story is interesting as it demonstrates that the headlines on peer-to-peer may not be changing, but the underlying story certainly is. The article is not what you might think – rather than yet another story alleging Canadian movie piracy or weak copyright laws, it is actually focused on how Canadians may not immediately benefit from the push to online video in the U.S. since many U.S. broadcasters will block out Canadian users.
What does that have to do with "video theft"? Other than the unnecessary use of a sensational headline based on the mistaken premise that this is a piracy issue, there is a brief reference in the article that notes that more Canadians will download television shows through peer-to-peer networks if they are blocked out of U.S. streams. Of course, the same shows are freely available on television, so this form of "piracy" is merely device shifting freely available content from one screen to another.
Leaving aside questions about whether this is actually a concern, I think it is noteworthy that the article flips around the conventional approach to business and peer-to-peer.
Competition Policy and IP
While response to last week's federal budget unsurprisingly focused on new spending, it also included a commitment to create an expert independent panel to conduct a review of Canadian competition policy. Given that the Minister of Industry envisions a broad mandate to "review anything under the federal umbrella that affects […]
DMCA Architect Acknowledges Need For A New Approach
McGill University hosted an interesting conference today on music and copyright reform. The conference consisted of two panels plus an afternoon of open dialogue and featured an interesting collection of speakers including Bruce Lehman, the architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties and the DMCA, Ann Chaitovitz of the USPTO, Terry Fisher of Harvard Law School, NDP Heritage critic Charlie Angus, famed music producer Sandy Pearlman, and myself. A video of the event has been posted in Windows format.
My participation focused on making the case against anti-circumvention legislation in Canada (it starts at about 54:30). I emphasized the dramatic difference between the Internet of 1997 and today, the harmful effects of the DMCA, the growing movement away from DRM, and the fact that the Canadian market has supported a range of online music services with faster digital music sales growth than either the U.S. or Europe but without anti-circumvention legislation.
The most interesting – and surprising – presentation came from Bruce Lehman, who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute. Lehman explained the U.S. perspective in the early 1990s that led to the DMCA (ie. greater control though TPMs), yet when reflecting on the success of the DMCA acknowledged that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright control have not been successful" (presentation starts around 11:00).
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