Music Downloading - How the Canadians Do It
While I have posted on music downloading, this is actually more of an intellectual curiosity of mine. With that understood, here is Maybe the Jury Didn’t Like the Songs from Slaw:
So how might this have played out in Canada? The legality of file sharing has been hotly debated in this country for many years, and the issue boiled over again recently with the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) trading pot shots in the press with copyright luminaries like Michael Geist and Howard Knopf over both the legality of the practice and its effect on the recording industry. The best guidance available to Canadians on the issue comes from two cases, decided in 2004 and 2008 respectively, which still leave some uncertainty as to the legality of file sharing in Canada. What is clear, however, is that thus far CRIA has not had nearly the same success in the Canadian Courts that the RIAA has had in the U.S.
Under Canada’s Copyright Act, private copying of a musical recording for private use is expressly permitted. The trade off is the requirement for payment by consumers of a blank media levy, which levy is payable on blank CD-ROMs and other “audio recording media”. The blank media levy provisions of the Act were inserted at the behest of CRIA and others, who have since collected multi–millions of dollars in such levies.
The private copying exemption was inserted into the Act in the days of LPs, cassettes, 8 Tracks and reel to reel recording devices – long before the Internet and digital recording media made the process of copying a recording much simpler and faster, with no degradation in the quality of the original recording, no matter how many generations removed the copy is from the original.
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So, musical tastes aside, a case similar to the Thomas-Rasset case in Canada would by no means have the same result. Even if CRIA were able to convince a Court to order an ISP to divulge the identity of the alleged file-sharer, and even if CRIA could prove to a Court that the defendant’s conduct in uploading or downloading the recordings in question was not within the private copying exemption, the total statutory damages that could be awarded to CRIA, if not grossly out of proportion to the damage suffered, could not exceed $20,000 per recording, for a total of $480,000 (Can.). Not a trifling amount to be sure, and if the Canadian Court decided to add punitive damages on top of that, a result not far off the Thomas-Rasset decision could arise.
Having said that, the likelihood of the music industry actually receiving payment of such monies from file-sharing defendants is pretty remote: as Ms. Thomas-Rasset rightly quipped, “You can’t get blood from a turnip”. Clearly, it is the publicity from such monumental awards that RIAA and CRIA really covet in their efforts to deter what they see as a serious threat to their livelihood. Whether such deterrence is actually achieved in the long run is anyone’s guess. In any event, we may never get the chance to see a case like this in Canada: it appears that the RIAA is now changing its strategy in the U.S. to target ISPs rather than individual file sharers, and it seems reasonable to assume that CRIA will, again, follow suit.
This is like the government, in cahoots with the RIAA, going after some mom in Ohio for stupidly leaving Kazaa running on her machine and discovering she's been a transit point for the "Best of Bee Gee's" for the past two years. Meanwhile, the Asian mobs off the Indonesian coast are cranking out commercial counterfeit CDs by the millions. Do something about that first before you go after the oh-so-dangerous mom in Ohio.
