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 The
Status of Copyright Reform in Canada
Bart Cormier
The prospect of Canadian copyright reform has
been quietly simmering in the political background for years.
Political pressure in Canada to reform the Copyright Act
arises from two main sources, Canada’s participation in
international copyright treaty negotiations and pressure from
industry and lobbyist groups.
In 1997, Canada joined with other G-20
countries in signing two treaties administered by the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the WIPO Copyright
Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. These
treaties introduce new and expanded rights for certain classes
of rights holders, in particular performers and makers of
sound recordings. These rights include, for example, the right
for authors to control the making available of their material
on the Internet, protections to prevent the circumvention, for
infringing purposes, of technological measures applied to
copyright material, moral rights for performers in their fixed
and live performances, and increased rights for photographers
in their works.
While Canada has yet to ratify these treaties,
and so is technically under no obligation to bring its laws
into line with the treaty requirements, there is evidence that
the Canadian government is susceptible to the suggestion that
it is not living up to its international obligations. Pressure
in this regard comes particularly from the United States
government, which has ratified the WIPO treaties and, as a
result, introduced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
to provide additional protections and remedies for copyright
rights holders. As an example of political pressure applied by
the US government, for the past few years Canada has been
cited on the Watch List of the US Trade Representative’s
Special 301 Report, which identifies foreign countries that
“deny adequate and effective protection of intellectual
property rights or fair and equitable market access for US
persons that rely on intellectual property protection”.
The second force driving Canadian copyright
reform is pressure from industry and lobbyist groups,
particularly representatives of the film and music industries.
The general position of these groups is that Canada’s copyright laws are
antiquated and insufficient to enable these industries to
protect themselves from piracy, in particular the distribution
of digital media through peer-to-peer technologies.
As a result of these pressures, in late 2005,
Parliament introduced Bill C-60, an Act to Amend the
Copyright Act. Bill C-60 was meant to address the requirements
of the WIPO treaties but took a softer approach than some of
the hard-line provisions criticized in the DMCA. Bill C-60,
however, died before becoming law.
One of the most interesting results of the
introduction of Bill C-60 was the rise of new and vocal
interest groups demanding a greater balance of rights between
copyright owners and copyright consumers (i.e. the general
public). For example, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition
was formed when a group of prominent Canadian musicians
publicly broke away from the music industry’s main advocacy
group, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA). The
artists stated that the reforms proposed by CRIA reflected the
interests of the music industry over those of Canadian
musicians and music consumers.
The announcement of a forthcoming re-vamped
copyright reform bill in mid-2007 led many commentators to
believe that the new copyright bill would be much more similar
to the DMCA than Bill C-60. As of the date of this article, however, no
replacement bill has been introduced by the Canadian
government.
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