If you think the cards are stacked in favour of tough new copyright legislation, consider what the RCMP thinks about our current legislation.
A snail-mailed bulletin from an industry blog and news site called The Consumer Electronics Daily News reported comments made Friday by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer to an American Bar Association hosted conference in San Francisco on Criminal Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights.
According to The Consumer Electronics Daily, Cpl. David Sutherland, a co-ordinator of the RCMP's Ontario branch of the Intellectual Property Crime division, lashed out at Canadian law and government policy, which, he said, don't protect copyright enough; his remarks were made while talking about how much co-operation U.S. authorities can expect when their investigations take them north of the border.
Quoted in a short Consumer Electronics Daily piece dated Sept. 30, called “Candour from Canada,” he said of Canada that “It's a different culture, and it's going to take time for people to realize the severe implications of piracy.”
(Don't bother trying to find the quote on the CEDailyNews.com website — it's not there. But it was sent by them and received by an American source who wishes to remain anonymous and passed on to me as a PDF file.)
The Canadian Supreme Court has protected making personal copies of copyrighted works, he said, and noted that consumers pay a levy on digital media that's “certainly adding 25 to 30 per cent in price” to compensate performers for infringement. Thus, he concludes, “a lot of the public feel it's OK to dabble in piracy."
Then he criticized the country as a whole, saying that Canada is home to less expertise on infringement than the United States.
Well. The audience was apparently startled by Cpl. Sutherland's, um, candour, and asked him about it.
“I don't see any point in lying,” he said, and he wanted to set realistic expectations for the audience. “Law enforcement agencies are doing the best they can under the circumstances,” the bulletin continued, “and the main problem is how the courts interpret the law.”
Working on the assumption that the Consumer Electronics Daily News has reported the corporal's position and words accurately, we have to wonder what a cop is doing criticizing Canadian law. The police aren't supposed to wish that certain laws be more or less strict; their duty is to uphold the law in current force. Could a policeman decide that the laws governing, say, corporate governance aren't strict enough and then lobby publicly to have them revised to his liking?
Worse, the RCMP know very well that copyright legislation is a hot-button issue in Canada, and inveighing on the matter would simply stir up more debate and convince the public that the police have already made their minds up about whom they would like to prosecute.
I asked copyright lawyer Howard Knopf what he thought of all this, and he said that “It's not accurate to suggest that the ‘Canadian Supreme Court has protected making personal copies of copyrighted works.'” Mr. Knopf said that “the closest they have come was to allow for the making of copies for fair dealing purposes involving research.”
The corporal is also wrong about levies adding 25 to 30 per cent in price. “The increase is much more in most cases,” Mr. Knopf said. “The current levy on blank CDs is 21 cents each, which is more than the common price for blank DVDs, which are not levied, and more the common retail price for blank CDs in the United States. The music industry wants to raise the Canadian levy to 29 cents.”
Moreover, Mr. Knopf said that if Cpl. Sutherland “is referring to the downloading of music as being ‘piracy,' he's wrong. The Canadian Copyright Act makes downloading of music onto an audio recording medium perfectly legal, and the Copyright Board itself has indicated that this applies to hard disks in personal computers."
It doesn't seem, from this perspective, that Cpl. Sutherland has a firm grasp of the law he has sworn to uphold.
Moreover, his forthrightness comes at a time when The Privy Council Office has put an unprecedented gag order on government business during the federal election. Public servants “are expected to maintain a low profile during an election and avoid public commentary on any matters that could potentially impact, or be perceived as impacting, on the election," PCO spokeswoman Myriam Massabki was quoted as saying by the Ottawa Citizen on Monday.
Perhaps her memo never reached Cpl. Sutherland.
