Canadians, download away!
http://www.tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3839
Music downloading legal in Canada
Industry and critics up in arms as judge rules that peer-to-peer users doing nothing wrong
By Alessandro Cancian
Originally Published: 2004-04-11
And so, while the French, British and U.S. recording industry announced new legal attacks on peer-to-peer users for the coming weeks, their Canadian sister will be forced to think twice.
In the land of the maple leaf, in fact, a federal judge ruled last week that sharing copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks is legal. The ruling was hard to swallow for recording companies that had already been forced to review their plans.
In December, in fact, the Copyright Board of Canada (
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/), which handles intellectual property rights, established that, based on Canadian Law or loopholes thereof, downloading music, movies and other copyrighted material was legal.
The regulators cited a long-standing rule in Canada, in which most copying for personal use was allowed. To repay artists and record labels for revenue lost by this activity, the government imposes a fee on blank tapes, CDs and even hard disk-based MP3 players such as Apple Computer's iPod, and distributes that revenue to copyright holders.
Secretary General Claude Majeau's remarks were tough to accept for the majors, despite the clarification that the Board considered uploading to be illegal; they elicited a storm of controversy from the Canadian Recording Industry Association.
CRIA General Councillor Richard Pfohl dismissed the remarks of the Copyright Board, trusting judges to "confirm the illegality of downloading".
Apparently, the judge shared the opinion of the Copyright Board.
Canadian record labels had asked the court for authorization to identify 29 alleged file swappers in the country, in preparation for suing them for copyright infringement. But the judge denied that request. In a far-ranging decision, the court further found that both downloading music and putting it in a shared folder available to other people online appeared to be legal in Canada.
This ruling all but prevents the majors from getting any Canadian p2p user convicted. What is most striking about this ruling is that the judge declared legal not just the downloading of music but also the sharing of any quantity of files.
This first ruling will certainly be appealed, as the local recording industry has immediately declared its displeasure.
Canada, despite heavy pressuring from the industry, never passed its version of the DMCA or EUCD, the draconian copyright laws enacted by the United States and the European Union, and interpretation of the law can lead to surprises.
The ruling was based on the judge's finding that CRIA had not managed to prove the alleged violations. But he also questioned whether CRIA had a copyright case at all.
The judge accepted the Copyright Board's early decision almost without comment, but he went further, citing a recent Supreme Court decision to say that making music available online also appeared to be legal.
In that recent case, the Supreme Court ruled that libraries were not "authorizing" copyright infringement simply by putting photocopy machines near books. The libraries were justified in assuming that their customers were using the copiers in a legal manner, the high court ruled.
The judge said the same rationale should apply to peer-to-peer users because, before it will be illegal, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory.
So up until you don't advertise your shared files you can still sleep and dream.