Michael Geist

Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, who serves as the party's deputy house leader, has been sending the following letter to concerned constituents about Bill C-61.  The letter, which is the most substantive that I have seen, is posted in its entirety with permission.

Thank you for your letter concerning Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act. Over the last few months I have made a concerted effort to better inform myself of all of the issues associated with copyright reform in Canada. In this vein, I joined the Intellectual Property (IP), Anti-Counterfeiting and Anti-Piracy Parliamentary Caucus.  Through the meetings and consultations held by this group I came to the conclusion that reform of our copyright legislation will, I hope, have the following principles at its core:

1) Anti-circumvention measures and penalties must be linked to the efforts of those who violate copyright for commercial purposes, and not just the technology itself;

2) Provisions for flexible fair dealing. Fair dealing creates a limited number of exceptions, including private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting to charges of infringement.

3) It would also incorporate a fair and well defined 'notice and notice' system, which involves a notification from a copyright holder – often involving movies, software or music – claiming that a subscriber has made available or downloaded content without authorization on file sharing systems.  The Internet Service Provider forwards the notification to the subscriber but takes no other action – it does not pass along the subscriber's personal information, remove the content from its system, or cancel the subscriber's service.  It falls to the subscriber to remove the infringing content (if indeed it is infringing) voluntarily.

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