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Comparing The Two Copyright Bills: C-32 vs. C-61

Thanks to the hard work of my research assistant Keith Rose, posted below is comparison chart of the two Conservative copyright bills – this week's C-32 vs. the 2008 C-61 bill.  An annotated version can be accessed here.  A straight comparison is available here and embedded below. 

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9 Comments

  1. The more things change
    Wow, section 41 (TPMs) has really not undergone much change since C-61. It seems as though Minister Moore really wanted to keep the digital locks section intect from C-61. I guess the public consultation regarding DRM and TPMs really did amount to nothing in the governments mind.

  2. Mr Geist – to download this apparently requires that a person have a Facebook account or else an email address they are willing to utilize their email address to “sign up” for a service that one would not otherwise consider using. Could the pdfs please be hosted elsewhere? Thanks.

  3. Keith Rose says:

    Statutory damages reduced for non-commercial circumvention
    It’s not part of section 41, but I think the removal of s. 38.1(1.4), which in C-61 excluded the reduced statutory damages for any infringement “made possible” by a circumvention, is pretty significant. It means that non-commercial circumvention carries a much lower statutory penalty. (Complainants can elect to seek actual damages instead, but they’d have to demonstrate losses.)

  4. Jamie Macey says:

    Download Link
    I’ve downloaded the comparison PDF and put it up on my public share on Dropbox. For those who don’t want to give identifying information to Scribd:

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3425793/32485771-C-61-C-32-Comparison-No-Annotation-English.pdf

    Thanks to Keith for putting it together.

  5. Laurel L. Russwurm says:

    Are PDFs DRM?
    If so, won’t deconstructing a PDF become illegal under C-32?
    http://whoacanada.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/are-pdfs-drm/

    Since governments seem to love giving out information we’re entitled to on PDFs this could make Canada a but too interesting.

  6. interesting wording
    pg 1 Summary (b) clarify Isp liability and make the enabling of online copyright infringement itself an infringement of copyright.

    pg 2 section 1.1 For the purposes of this Act, communication of a work or other subject matter to the public by telecommunication in a way that allows a member of the public to have access to it from and at a time individually chosen by that member of the public.

    ……….

    the first appears to directly target torrent/link list providers based in canada, however, it could also apply to other list generators such as more general search engines. if read broadly enough it could also apply to Isp traffic monitoring for potentially infringing lines of traffic that also happen to clog their network.

    the second could establish a blacklisting of ‘known infringers’ such as streaming sites, torrent links, other, that exist outside of canada in order to limit liability on the isp’s part by knowingly participating after notification of the existence of such sites.

    mildly paranoid? perhaps, but we’ve seen worse from the parties involved.

  7. I’ve read it over and was wondering if it is possible for citizens to recommend specific changes to this bill that could be taken seriously? If so, how? Thanks.

  8. @Mark
    well as far as politiciens are conserned… citizens are only sheeps that votes not people so… no.

  9. Andrei Mincov says:

    Modernization of the Inconceivable
    In my new article, “Modernization of the Inconceivable”, at http://mincov.com/articles/index.php/fullarticle/modernization_of_the_inconceivable/ (http://bit.ly/8YQZ3r), I explain why modernization of the copyright law based on compromise and concessions, without a good understanding of the underlying principles of copyright protection, is doomed to fail.

    Copyright laws exist either for the protection of the creator, or for the benefit of the public. There is no middle ground. As long as we keep entrusting the government (any government) to find the right “balance” between the two, we are destined to keep on making up exclusions from limitations on exceptions from the rights – without even stopping for a second to question why we are doing this.