Canada moves to amend its copyright laws
For those of you that follow news in the digital copyright arena, you’ll be interested to hear that the Canadian government has tabled an amendment to the Copyright Act that is aimed at modernizing it.
Called Bill C60, the new law, if passed, would update the Canada’s Copyright Act to bring it up to speed with file-sharing and burning copies of CDs and movies.
The amendment would make it illegal to upload material for sharing to services like Kazaa or BitTorrent, unless you’re the rights holder It also addresses tampering stopping people from cracking copyright protection on media. But, thankfully, it doesn’t stop people from making copies for personal use. However it does stop them from redistributing those copies.
Notably the ISPs get an exemption. They can not be held liable for copyright infringement if their users engage in the practice and store content on their service. Also the law targets the infringers and not the technology unlike the U.S.-based Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
What’s missing is the faliure to remove the Canadian levy built into the price of blank CDs other blank media which was create to compensate rights holders.
Who wins in all this? The record companies. Who loses? Individual consumers.
A good source for further analysis is lawyer and columnist Michael Geist.
The entire wording of C-60 available from the Canadian government here
