Copyright Law

Canadian Music Industry: ?Copyright Laws are So Out of Date?

By soulxtc

Responds to recent efforts by BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay to have courts declare the site legal or illegal once and for all.

The case of the isoHunt BitTorrent tracker site against the Canadian Record Industry Association (CRIA) revved up late late week and the CRIA already has some choice words to describe being on the defense side a of file-sharing case

“This is man bites dog,” said CRIA lawyer Richard Pfohl, about isoHunt taking the offensive.

Back in May of last year BitTorrent tracker site isoHunt, along with its sister sites Torrentbox.com and Podtropolis.com, received a cease-and-desist letter from the Canadian Record Industry Association (CRIA). In the letters the CRIA claimed that the sites served no other purpose other than to engage in copyright infringement of the CRIA’s music catalogue.

“We pointed them to our copyright policy ( http://isohunt.com/dmca-copyright.php ), and that we have cooperated in the past in identification and takedown of links they wanted removed,” noted Gary Fung, President of isoHunt Inc., in a post on the site. “We asked them in subsequent letters to identify links to their copyrighted files as we had done in 2006. They ignored our offers, and cited there’s no ’safe harbor’ for a service provider like us and our copyright policy doesn’t mean anything to them in Canada.”

It was their refusal to assist in taking down torrent trackers that link to copyrighted material that served as the impetus for Fung to take pre-emptive action so that the courts could clarify his legal rights.

“We intend to take this all the way up to the Canadian Supreme Court unless CRIA settles with us out of court in any reasonable way,” Fung added.

However, the CRIA is far from near on a “reasonable” settlement, and ponders at the juxtaposition of being on the side of a file-sharing opposite to the one it’s used too.

“Our laws are so out of date and there is such uncertainty in our laws here in Canada that no one knows what the law is,” said Pfohl. “Canada is the only jurisdiction in the world where the operator of the file-sharing service has sued the rights-holders.”

The CRIA is correct in criticizing copyright laws, just as music fans and consumers have for years. But, something tells me their solution involves punishing the latter to benefit the former.

CRIA head Graham Henderson also blames outdated Canadian copyright laws for the awkward position of being sued by the very sort of site it’s targeted over the years for the facilitation of copyright infringement.

“If Canada’s laws were on par with those of Europe, the U.S., Japan and everywhere else I can think of, then [isoHunt] would have no doubt received advice from their lawyers that they would be insane to bring an action like this,” said Henderson. “In the absence, in a vacuum, you have this kind of man-bites-dog story possible and, frankly, it starts to make us look like the laughingstock of the world.”

Yet, t he only one who’s made into a laughingstock is the CRIA, and that started LONG AGO. The CRIA and its ilk have done everything in their power to try and shape society and technology to suit the needs of a business model that changed entirely nearly a decade ago. What would make the CRIA even more of a laughingstock is if we are still having this same conversation a decade from now.

With no copyrighted material EVER touching isoHunt’s server’s, a court decision to shut it down would have dire consequences for all. Just ask Google, a behemoth of a copyrighted material tracker search engine.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).