Canada May Ratify WIPO Copyright Treaty

rocjoe71 writes "It appears the Government of Canada might be ratifying the WIPO copyright treaty, which will surely bring an end to our P2P downloading heydays. Among the measures that could be enforced by ratifying WIPO would force ISPs to comply with a 'notice and takedown' system against subscribers who violate copyright laws... As we speak RIAA lawyers are amassing on the Canada-U.S. border, ready for an all-out invasion."

Comments

Not likely to happen soon.

[Pig Hogger]

Canada currently has a minority government, and they have far bigger problems to deal with than copyright law extensions.

Re:Not likely to happen soon.

[nusratt]

I read your sig/link.
It would be nice if you'd at least acknowledge cognizance of the fact that there are almost 50% of us -- about 150 MILLION -- who are AT LEAST as unhappy about it as you are.
Remember: we also suffer all the consequences experienced by the rest of you, AND we LIVE here.

Did you feel the same animus against the millions of ordinary nameless faceless Soviet citizens, when their government invaded Afghanistan?

I saw this comming...

[Steamhead]

As a Canadian I can see that our two cultures are too intertwined for this not to happen, we usually pride ourselves on not being American, but we are always only a few years behind.

I suppose its truly time to move to Europe...

ISPs, Policing Copyright and Existing Taxes

[zrafnid]

Here we go again. If the Gov't wants to make ISPs responsible for the actions of their users, I certainly hope they're planning on providing some payment for the time it will take.

Effectively, the action suggested in the article would make an ISP a branch of law enforcement - requiring them to comply with orders to disable user accounts and, probably, pay penalties for non-compliance with such orders.

I now question, quite strongly, the reason there are taxes on blank CDs, DVDs, Video Tapes, and other storage media. I had believed that this tax was to go directly to SOCAN (the Canadian RIAA equivalent) to ensure that artists were compensated for copies of their materials. If they now believe that any person downloading a song that they already own is a target for prosecution, I don't think I'll be too keen on paying those taxes. Time to talk to the MP in these parts, I guess.

What to write

[alexo]

Canada is an immigration country.

A lot of residents are not comfortable writing to their representatives due to either limited proficiency in English (and/or French) or not knowing what phrasing is "socially acceptable" in Canada.

Some example letters could be very helpful for these people.

Re:What to write

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright is a system for regulating technology -- it regulates technologies used to make and distribute copies. We have lots of technology regulation in the world: there are rules that govern the operation of automobiles and rules that govern the marketing of electrical appliances. This isn't per se wrong.

But when the 20 horsepower locomotive was invented, the blacksmiths weren't able to successfully lobby to have 80 horseshoes welded to each engine, despite the rule that said that every "horse" used for transport needed four shoes. When you invent a railroad, you need railroad-rules for it, not horse-and-buggy rules. The facts that the railroad doesn't need shoes, or oats, or curry-combs don't reflect bugs in railroading: they are the feautres of railroading.

The Internet has one overarching feature that makes it superior to the technologies that preceded it: it can copy arbitrary blobs of data from one place to another at virtually no cost, in virutally no time, with virtually no control. This is not a bug. This is what the Internet is supposed to do.

It was really foresighted in 1996 for WIPO to sit down to update copyright law to suit the Internet. They recognised that the Internet was a fundamentally different thing from the technologies that came before it, and of course, a new technology needs new rules and regulation.

But WIPO got it horribly wrong. The approach that WIPO took to regulating the net was to create a set of rules that tried to make the Internet act more like radio, or TV, or photocopiers -- like all the things that it had already made rules for. The WIPO approach treated the ease of copying on the net as a bug, and set out to fix it.

Notice-and-takedown is an area where WIPO got it drastically, terribly wrong.

If you own a restaurant, you're not responsible for policing your customers to ensure that none of them are carrying stolen bank-loot. If someone burst in and pointed at the guy at the back table and said, "He's wearing my hat!" no one would blame you if you didn't wrestle the hat away from him and give it back to the accuser.

But under notice-and-takedown, this is what we ask of our ISPs. If you allow users to host stuff, you're responsible for what they host. If they put an infringing file on your server, you're required to know what they've put online, and you'll share in their punishment if you fail to block them from posting infringing material.

Now what is and isn't a copyright infringement isn't anything like a clearcut issue. ISPs aren't equipped to evaluate what's infringing and what isn't -- hell, even Supreme Court judges have a hard time figuring it out. Operating a server doesn't qualify you to understand and evaluate copyright law.

So there's a get-out-of-jail in notice-and-takedown. If you respond to accusations of infringement by taking your customers' materials offline quickly, you won't share in their liability. Now, given the kinds of penalties available to rights-holders for online infringment (in the US, it's $150,000 per infringement!), it's not surprising that most ISPs avail themself of this "safe harbour," removing stuff whenever a complaint comes in.

But a complaint isn't proof -- someone who rings up your ISP and says, "That file infringes on my rights" is like the guy who busts into a restaurant and shouts, "That guy is wearing my hat!" There's no way for an ISP to evaluate whether he's genuinely aggreived, whether he's nursing a grudge, whether he's just a nut. In the US, nuts, grudge-nursers and flakes all use notice-and-takedown to censor the Internet and get material removed.

Usually rights-holders will counter that this can be addressed through something called "counter-notification," where an ISP that's removed something is given the right to contact its customer and say, "This guy says you infringed his copyright. If you disagree, let us know and we'll put your file back online and you two can sort it out in court."

But in practice, counter-notification is a rare

My letter

[lhaeh]

I'm sure you've revieved many emails about this so I'll keep it short.

I am against the WIPO. It will raise the cost of doing business for IT
companys.

It will curtial free speach; If I were to send an anonymous takedown
letter to an isp claiming that a site is violating my copyright, they
would take it down without a question. The ISP would have no other
econimically viable choice. This tatic has been abused in countrys
with simular laws.

This law only placets the CIRA. We have given them enough concessions
already, in the form of recordable media leavys. These leavys hurt
independant artists, like myself, who want to distrubute their works
on CD. The CDs cost less then the leavy they are stuck with.