Keenan, Tims

Copyright Consultations

1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
For years copyright law in Canada has gotten more an more unfair to the consumer and friendly to large media corporations. With copyright terms at 50 years after the death of the creator, creative individuals are not encouraged to produce new work and the Canadian public must support their inactivity (and even their heirs!) with continued copyright payments. With new technologies appearing on a daily basis, and the need already to circumvent industry protections on media just to exercise fair-use rights, Canada needs to swing the balance back the other way.

Canada should make several changes to modernize its copyright law:

Copyright terms should be shortened to only a few years after the creator's death. There is no reason why copyright terms should extend after the creator has passed on; the purpose of copyright is to foster ingenuity and creativity, that purpose is not served by passing copy rights down through generations.

Fair-use protections must be strengthened to guarantee Canadian consumers the right to use the media they have purchased in the way that they see fit, with whatever upcoming or current technology is available to them. Copying for the purpose of consuming that media (eg. Cracking CSS encryption to play a DVD in Linux) should be explicitly protected, as should copying for any personal use, including format shifting, time shifting or any other future use. Furthermore, there should be no mention in Copyright legislation about 'encryption' or 'copy protection' technology. Fair-use rights must trump these protections, and while rightsholders have the right to utilise them, they must not be given control over how consumers choose to use the media.

2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?
Canada's copyright legislation must stand the test of time in two ways. First, it must provide protection to consumers such that media they purchase from rightsholders isn't artificially time limited by that rightsholder. Consumers should feel safe that media they purchase today will still be usable in 10, 15 or even 100 years. Today, that is not the case as we've seen plenty of examples where large corporations have decided to shut down their DRM authentication systems, leaving users out in the cold, without access to their media. The Conservative Bill C-61 would have even legally prevented these users from attempting to access their media at any time in the future — even if the media was no longer available, or the service they obtained it from defunct. Worse, these protections can easily 'orphan' certain content that is no longer financially viable for the rightsholder, but which may hold interest to consumers. These items may never again be seen by the public if private copies 'expire' and can't be used, and the rightsholders are unwilling to produce new media. Even once copyright expires, this content may never again enter the public corpus. Libraries are well aware of these concerns and have been outspoken in trying to protect the future of Canadian content. Without protecting consumer rights, there may be a huge gap in historical content from our era.

Secondly, Canada's copyright legislation must be written in general conceptual terms, and not with respect to current technologies. It must address sharing between users via any communication medium, it must address content protection in all of its forms (by providing users the fair-use rights to circumvent them). Bill C-61 is an abject failure here, as it mentions specific technologies and mediums. Copyright must be medium- and technology-agnostic.

3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
Creativity and innovation, both in the creative and technological sectors, is best fostered by a short-term copyright with generous fair-use provisions. A huge amount of recent art and music makes explicit use of other artist's work; an entire genre of modern music is based on sampling and mashing up previous songs, and similar trends are seen in other mediums. Under current copyright law, this is probably not permitted, and artists are fearful that they will be attacked by rightsholders for what is clearly a completely new art work. Even average consumers are affected by this when they submit home videos to public web sites that may contain irrelevant, yet still illegal, copyrighted material. We must protect these artists.

Technology changes far too quickly for any legislation to keep up, and the legislation must anticipate this if it's going to be relevant. Innovative products such as TiVO, online services like YouTube and consumers utilizing new technologies not supported by rightsholders must be protected. Copyright should not grant rightsholders anything beyond the right to control commercial distribution; how consumers use the media they purchase must not be under their control.

Canada must finally provide strong protection to 'common carrier' services. Material provided to the public by users of a service should not make that service liable for any potential copyright infringement, and furthermore must protect those posting users from abusive copyright claims. ISPs and other network carriers must not be responsible for any part of the enforcement of copyright legislation; that is a job for the legal system, and the ISP's responsibility ends at what a judge instructs them to provide to a court. They must not be charged with being 'copyright police' for the content industry.

4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
Competition is not something that copyright directly affects; in fact, copyright essentially grants rightsholders a monopoly over their content. The only way to foster competition is to eliminate copyright entirely, such that competing businesses could sell media created by others. I don't believe that this is a good idea, it will stifle creativity and put money in the wrong pockets. Creators must be protected from other commercial interests; that is the purpose of copyright, but it is the opposite of fostering competition - by design. Maintaining this limited commercial monopoly over a work is exactly what drives investment.

5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?
This is only tangentially related to copyright, but Canada's legislators must improve the Internet access situation in this country. We are quickly falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to Internet connection pricing and performance as a result of years of stagnation. This gap will continue to widen as long as well allow the ILECs and cable companies to exist in a duopoly. This is a critical issue for today's economy, and one that must be dealt with quickly before Canada's significant technological industry leaves. If the copyright changes outlined above are ratified, and Canada's ISPs start to invest in infrastructure instead of abusing their customers with discriminatory 'traffic shaping' and unreasonably low usage caps, we will be in a world-leading position on digital issues.

Keenan Tims Langley, BC