Canadian DMCA
The Canadian government has finally unveiled its much-delayed copyright legislation and, in the enormity of its capitulation to US big media, is even worse than observers had feared. The last time it pulled back from tabling the proposed law, it backed off in the face of unexpected grass-roots opposition. In doing so, it promised a consultative process and an end result balanced between the needs of rights-holders and users. This process consisted of slapping a few token concessions to the consumer in the press release and then clawing them back in the fine print.
For example, the bill places a limit on damages awardable for unlicensed downloading, at $500. Its real target appears not to be cash-strapped kids downloading tunes they couldn’t buy anyway, but legit purchasers of media. This is, after all, where the money is. The bill heavily punishes DRM circumvention for any purpose - even to transfer between media for personal use. It’s really about trying to extort people into paying multiple times for the same piece of entertainment.
It makes time shifting legal; recording to VHS was never made explicitly legal in Canada, although of course it was functionally so. On the surface this is supposed to be a good thing, but really the bill is about changing the playing field for the next iteration of that technology, the PVR. If passed, cable companies will have to not only alter their firmware to prevent recording from the PVR to VCR. Under the terms of a provision against building a digital library, they’ll have to set a time limit, after which the PVR will erase your saved program. Although this bill is demonstrably the result of high-pressure lobbying from US trade representatives, here they go even beyond the provisions of the American DMCA.
And of course there is no provision for any proportion of its many infringement fines to be distributed to artists, even when the materials infringed are produced on a royalty basis.
As a small-fry rights holder and someone who makes a living selling his creative work, I want effective curbs on actual unlicensed downloading. To some extent, this will be handled technologically, for reasons unrelated to copyright practice. P2P will fade as service providers move, for bandwidth protection reasons, to traffic shaping and heavy bandwidth surcharges. Mostly, however, it this will be a hearts and minds battle, convincing the audience to financially support the process by which creative works are made available to them.
The hope is that that an additional layer of cynicism is in play here. According to this theory, the minority Conservatives are introducing a punitive bill now so they can tell the Americans that they tried. Then they'll let it die on the order paper as they recess for the summer.
This does not mean that opponents of the bill can afford to be complacent.
Perhaps more saliently, damage has already been done. Measures like this are wildly counterproductive in the battle for the ethical high ground, even if they never leave the proposal stage. They make infringement into a rebel blow struck against a bloated, extortionate distribution mechanism.
If you make everyone an infringer, everyone will infringe.