ishmael n. daro

The Conservative Party is hoping to revive the much-hated Bill C-61. It was proposed in 2008 and, had it been passed, would have allowed for fines of up to $20,000 for certain activities such as uploading music onto a file-sharing network. It was very much a punitive, heavy-handed American-style approach to questions of intellectual property. Luckily, there was a groundswell of opposition, led by University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, and the bill was not passed.

Now, however, it seems the Conservatives want to try again and it doesn’t seem like much has changed about the substance of the bill.

The Globe and Mail reports:

This kick at the can, a followup to the ill-fated Bill C-61 of two years ago, is expected to go some way to appeasing international partners – especially the European Union and the United States – and big players in the entertainment industry, who want tougher rules on using copyrighted material.

One government insider said Canada simply cannot ignore the international consensus on the issue and make it acceptable for people to violate copyright, because major corporations will choose not to invest in Canada.

Of course, the threat that “major corporations will choose not to invest in Canada” is complete bogus. Canada is still an enormous, tech-savvy market that no serious media company will ignore. The entire copyright saga of the last decade is essentially between consumers who are adopting and adapting to technology very quickly and media companies that don’t understand or don’t trust the technology and the changes it is bringing about. They also probably want to continue making the obscene profits of the last four decades but people aren’t willing to pay those inflated prices.

As has been repeatedly documented, those who download materials illegally, or pirates, are also the biggest purchasers. A Norwegian study last year, for example, found that “illegal music connoisseurs are significantly more likely to purchase music than the average, non-P2P-loving user.”

Yet, despite being the best customers of the media giants, those same companies are pushing harder than ever to criminalize more and more online activity. Actual content creators, the musicians and filmmakers of the world, rarely see much of the money that record and film companies rake in and are usually just as frustrated by these companies’ old-fashioned thinking.

In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, lead singer of OK Go Damian Kulash described how stupidly their record label EMI had behaved. OK Go became a hit when their homemade video for the song “Here It Goes Again” went viral. Says Kulash, “To the band, ‘Here It Goes Again’ was a successful creative project. To the record company, it was a successful, completely free advertisement.”

But after the success of the video, EMI changed tack:

Now we’ve released a new album and a couple of new videos. But the fans and bloggers who helped spread “Here It Goes Again” across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

A few years ago, reeling from plummeting record sales, record companies went after YouTube, demanding payment for streams of their material. They saw videos, suddenly, as potential sources of revenue. YouTube agreed to pay the record companies a tiny amount for each stream, but — here’s the crux of the problem — they pay only when the videos are viewed on YouTube’s own site.

And so it goes. The copyright fight continues.

This latest attempt in Canada as well as the secretive international ACTA are on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of technology, but here we go again.

- -
image: Flickr
.