CRIA Files Appeal In Canadian Uploading Case

Cowards Anonymous writes "Not a big surprise really, according to this article, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has filed an appeal of last month's court decision that said ISPs couldn't be forced to reveal the identities of file uploaders. The CRIA argues that current copyright law doesn't allow Canadians to download and freely copy songs from the internet. They claim that the judge in last month's ruling '... made serious and reviewable errors of law, made overriding and palpable errors in his assessment of the factual record before him, and, in the end, purported to exercise his discretion on improper and irrelevant bases, and in a manner of excess of his jurisdiction.' Meanwhile, Heritage Minister Helene Scherrer wants the federal govt. to ratify a couple of international treaties that protect the ownership of copyrighted materials. If signed they would give the CRIA's case more legal weight."

Comments

Re:Copying for Personal Use OK

[Mikkeles]

You are correct; I (foolishly) used the term as "the other end of a download":^)
What I mean is: making a copy on your hard drive available for download would count as distribution (subsection (2)(b)) or communicating to the public by telecommunication (subsection (2)(c)).

Re:Copying for Personal Use OK

[Mikkeles]

'If I have copies of music on my local system and leave F&PS open (as is the default with older versions of Windows), am I then guilty of distributing the content?'

Since 'purpose' is explicitly mentioned in the act, I would think not; especially as there is nothing in the Windows documentation that comes with the installation to indicate that F&PS is a problem. If I recall, the only statement is that you can share with your other computers! On the other hand, if F&PS is wide open, you'll probably be 0wn3d as a spam server or warez site in short order ;^) Of course, if you're an experienced admin, there is a good possibility that the courts would determine that you should have known.

'If we take it a step further, and I have an ftp server available but secured with a single username/pass combo and someone guesses it or otherwise gains access... does that mean I'm distributing?'

Probably not; I think it would be much the same as though someone broke into your house and stole the CD copy you hade made. (Unless your username/pass combo is anonymous/e-mail address.)

'Most P2P applications will simply hunt out your media and share it. Will the law now make users responsible for how their software is configured, when it's the application providers who are setting the defaults?'

Well, the only P2P app I've ever used was some version of KaZaa and it was very obvious in the docs exactly where the shared directory was and how to ensure that anything you did not intend to provide for distribution was not so distributed. In this case, I think reasonable care could be expected of anyone to ensure that they don't share.

'It's going to be some interesting times, that's for sure.'
Indeed!

(All of the above IMHO as IANAL :^)