Canada's own controversy over copyright legislation
Last month, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) became household names in the United States, as internet and technology giants like Wikipedia and Google engaged in a widely publicised day of protest and persuaded many Americans to petition their congressional representatives. Now, Canada’s own proposed Copyright Act amendments in Bill C-11 are garnering some comparisons to SOPA. “Can Canada’s version of SOPA be stopped?” asked journalist Peter Nowak in a recent Globe and Mail opinion piece.
We described Bill C-11 in an earlier post. The main opposition to Bill C-11 targets provisions that would make it illegal to break “digital locks,” i.e. measures that restrict how digital content can be used, even if the user has purchased the content legally. Critics say that these provisions essentially gut all of the other changes in the bill to liberalise users’ rights (e.g. expanded fair dealing exceptions, and inclusion of format-shifting, time-shifting and user generated content provisions, which would allow users to copy copyrighted materials in a variety of ways for non-commercial purposes), because users could not enjoy their right to copy or transform copyrighted material if bypassing the digital lock on the material is itself illegal. As outlined in Nowak’s article, critics have suggested a compromise that makes it illegal to break digital locks only in cases of willful copyright infringement.
Despite some opposition, Bill C-11 has not garnered nearly the same attention in Canada as SOPA has in the U.S. The one-day voluntary blackout by Wikipedia and other online protests against SOPA led 8 million users to look up their U.S. congressional representatives from Wikipedia, 4.5 million to sign Google’s online petition against SOPA, 2.4 million to post comments on Twitter, and enough to exert pressure on politicians that many proponents of the bill withdrew their support. By contrast, the Stop Bill C-11 Facebook page currently has only 3,000 members, and only 40 people turned up to a recent protest in Montreal.
