It's been a couple of weeks since the federal government introduced its long-awaited—or dreaded—amendments to the Copyright Act. As was feared, the bill is inconsistent and leaves Canadians vulnerable to pay outrageous damages for activities that no one could reasonably confuse with piracy.
To give one example, you come home with a new CD and a new DVD. You load them both on to your spacious hard drive to play them on your computer or to transfer them to an iPod or other mobile device. Under the proposed new law, you're probably okay with transferring the CD, at least for most CDs now in stores (record companies could decide at any time to change that—it would now be entirely up to them). With the DVD, on the other hand, you could face a lawsuit for at least $20,000 in damages, and possibly several times that, depending on who sues you. And those are just statutory damages—there could be punitive damages as well. Even the tools you used to copy your DVD to your hard drive or mobile device would be banned under bill C-61. And if record companies decide they don't want you putting music on your iPod, with a simple change on their end, you could face a $20,000 lawsuit there as well.
There's no shortage of scenarios online illustrating dire consequences of the proposed legislation—even for legitimate personal use. Larry Borsato has some observations here, Alec Saunders gives his own example here, and, of course, Michael Geist's blog and Howard Knopf's blog are chock full of comments.
Even putting those scenarios aside, C-61 is a failure. All along, we were told by the government that that amendments were needed to bring Canadian copyright law into the 21st century. But C-61 focuses on 20th century technologies—ones that will still be with us for a while, but whose days are numbered. At the same time, it either ignores the networked technologies on the horizon or explicitly removes them from the exemptions contained in the bill.
At best, this is copyright legislation for the last decade, not for the future. The government chose to avoid any serious rethinking of what copyright law should look like and will need to look like. And it's understandable that they wouldn't want to take that on—it wouldn't be easy. But what we got instead was superficial tinkering. I don't know if it's even paving the cow paths so much as throwing some gravel onto them. We're going to have to go through this all over again before too long.
Copyright law is a minefield at the best of times. One of the challenges is that these laws have been violated by nearly everyone, and we didn't need digital technology to get to that point. Photocopiers, tape recorders, and VCRs have been used for decades in ways that were not Copyright Act-approved. Canada has never even had laws that allow people to tape TV shows to watch at another time—something that is only now being introduced with C-61 ... now that people have been time shifting for more than 20 years.
But copyright laws are like speed limits—we seem to be okay with having them on the books as long as their enforcement is less than zealous. While it was never spelled out in the Copyright Act that you wouldn't get in hot water for time shifting or many other copyright violations, it was commonly understood that there was almost no chance that you would face prosecution or a lawsuit.
Unfortunately, we now have industries with outdated business models chomping at the bit to sue as many people as they can for as much as possible. That's the danger of tinkering around with copyright law at this time. Imagine how life would be if an industry association could file suit against you every time they thought they had evidence that you'd gone above the speed limit. If the government was determined to go ahead and cross this minefield, it owed it to Canadians to be very careful about what acts would be allowed or disallowed under its proposed reforms, but C-61 just isn't well thought out or precisely worded.
In the U.S., more than 20,000 people have already been sued by the recording industry. One woman was recently ordered to pay nearly a quarter-million dollars in damages for having about two CDs worth of songs in a shared folder on her computer. It looks like the government was trying to avoid these kind of situations for Canadians when it created a $500 statutory damages cap for personal use infringement. And that would be great. Unfortunately, the current language of the bill is too convoluted to provide any comfort that this would be a real cap. If that's the government's intention, then it should be easy to clarify the language through amendments.
With any contentious legislation, you have to make decisions around whose advice you're going to ignore. The problem here is that the government chose to ignore—or at least give less priority to—what was best for Canadians and brought forth legislation that only please a small number of industry groups (CRIA, CMPDA) while trying to placate Canadians with a few soundbites—throwing them a couple of bones around format shifting and time shifting, which has been an everyday practise for decades, even if it was never formally supported by legislation.
Yes, this bill could have been worse, but it should have been much better. If the government wasn't willing to tackle the deeper issues around copyright law, it should have just left the whole thing alone. But the U.S. lobbyists weren't going to let that happen, so we got what you'd expect from a half-assed process and a desire to appease the lobbyists—even if it was at the expense of Canadians.
Instead of spending his time tinkering around with copyright laws, I wish Industry Minister Jim Prentice had focused on providing more resources for IRAP. It's one of the most important programs in Canada for bringing our economy into the innovation era—and has been a great help to startups in Waterloo Region. Unfortunately, the program has run out of money just two months into its fiscal year. If Prentice really wants to do something that will benefit Canadians, he can let C-61 die on the order paper and put his support behind IRAP.
To give one example, you come home with a new CD and a new DVD. You load them both on to your spacious hard drive to play them on your computer or to transfer them to an iPod or other mobile device. Under the proposed new law, you're probably okay with transferring the CD, at least for most CDs now in stores (record companies could decide at any time to change that—it would now be entirely up to them). With the DVD, on the other hand, you could face a lawsuit for at least $20,000 in damages, and possibly several times that, depending on who sues you. And those are just statutory damages—there could be punitive damages as well. Even the tools you used to copy your DVD to your hard drive or mobile device would be banned under bill C-61. And if record companies decide they don't want you putting music on your iPod, with a simple change on their end, you could face a $20,000 lawsuit there as well.
There's no shortage of scenarios online illustrating dire consequences of the proposed legislation—even for legitimate personal use. Larry Borsato has some observations here, Alec Saunders gives his own example here, and, of course, Michael Geist's blog and Howard Knopf's blog are chock full of comments.
Even putting those scenarios aside, C-61 is a failure. All along, we were told by the government that that amendments were needed to bring Canadian copyright law into the 21st century. But C-61 focuses on 20th century technologies—ones that will still be with us for a while, but whose days are numbered. At the same time, it either ignores the networked technologies on the horizon or explicitly removes them from the exemptions contained in the bill.
At best, this is copyright legislation for the last decade, not for the future. The government chose to avoid any serious rethinking of what copyright law should look like and will need to look like. And it's understandable that they wouldn't want to take that on—it wouldn't be easy. But what we got instead was superficial tinkering. I don't know if it's even paving the cow paths so much as throwing some gravel onto them. We're going to have to go through this all over again before too long.
Copyright law is a minefield at the best of times. One of the challenges is that these laws have been violated by nearly everyone, and we didn't need digital technology to get to that point. Photocopiers, tape recorders, and VCRs have been used for decades in ways that were not Copyright Act-approved. Canada has never even had laws that allow people to tape TV shows to watch at another time—something that is only now being introduced with C-61 ... now that people have been time shifting for more than 20 years.
But copyright laws are like speed limits—we seem to be okay with having them on the books as long as their enforcement is less than zealous. While it was never spelled out in the Copyright Act that you wouldn't get in hot water for time shifting or many other copyright violations, it was commonly understood that there was almost no chance that you would face prosecution or a lawsuit.
Unfortunately, we now have industries with outdated business models chomping at the bit to sue as many people as they can for as much as possible. That's the danger of tinkering around with copyright law at this time. Imagine how life would be if an industry association could file suit against you every time they thought they had evidence that you'd gone above the speed limit. If the government was determined to go ahead and cross this minefield, it owed it to Canadians to be very careful about what acts would be allowed or disallowed under its proposed reforms, but C-61 just isn't well thought out or precisely worded.
In the U.S., more than 20,000 people have already been sued by the recording industry. One woman was recently ordered to pay nearly a quarter-million dollars in damages for having about two CDs worth of songs in a shared folder on her computer. It looks like the government was trying to avoid these kind of situations for Canadians when it created a $500 statutory damages cap for personal use infringement. And that would be great. Unfortunately, the current language of the bill is too convoluted to provide any comfort that this would be a real cap. If that's the government's intention, then it should be easy to clarify the language through amendments.
With any contentious legislation, you have to make decisions around whose advice you're going to ignore. The problem here is that the government chose to ignore—or at least give less priority to—what was best for Canadians and brought forth legislation that only please a small number of industry groups (CRIA, CMPDA) while trying to placate Canadians with a few soundbites—throwing them a couple of bones around format shifting and time shifting, which has been an everyday practise for decades, even if it was never formally supported by legislation.
Yes, this bill could have been worse, but it should have been much better. If the government wasn't willing to tackle the deeper issues around copyright law, it should have just left the whole thing alone. But the U.S. lobbyists weren't going to let that happen, so we got what you'd expect from a half-assed process and a desire to appease the lobbyists—even if it was at the expense of Canadians.
Instead of spending his time tinkering around with copyright laws, I wish Industry Minister Jim Prentice had focused on providing more resources for IRAP. It's one of the most important programs in Canada for bringing our economy into the innovation era—and has been a great help to startups in Waterloo Region. Unfortunately, the program has run out of money just two months into its fiscal year. If Prentice really wants to do something that will benefit Canadians, he can let C-61 die on the order paper and put his support behind IRAP.
