What a happy fuzz we've been in all these years. While Americans have been wrangling over gigantic recording-industry lawsuits, Canadians have been enjoying a pleasantly nebulous relationship with digital copyright. Nobody seems to know exactly what the letter of the law says (even lawyers say it's debatable in parts), so we laypeople have assumed that if our intentions are fair, everything will be all right.
Enough of this reverie. The Tories' new copyright bill, unveiled last week, is a glass of cold water to the face. It spells out in meticulous detail what you can and cannot do with digital media. And unless it's exactly what the copyright holder says you can do, odds are you can't do it.
On the surface of it, Jim Prentice's Bill C-61 spells out a number of consumer-friendly provisions like time-shifting, format-shifting and exceptions for personal use. But each one has an asterisk attached: users will be forbidden from breaking technological locks — sometimes called Digital Rights Management, or DRM — to access content.
This has the funny effect of making it kind of irrelevant how strong a digital lock is. The fact that the lock on an iTunes song is fairly easy to circumvent wouldn't matter, because now that lock would have the force of law behind it. Nor would it matter whether your intended use of the material is fair game, even under Canada's woefully ill-defined "fair dealing" provisions.
Want to rip a DVD so you can show your film-class students a series of clips? Nope. Want to post a Battlestar Galactica tribute video to YouTube? Time to hire a lawyer.
If it's locked — and the definition of what constitutes a lock is terrifically vague — then in most instances you can't touch it. The bill contains a warren of exceptions and special cases, but many of them still fall under the rubric of this no-lock-picking rule, effectively defeating the purpose. The bottom line is, what the copyright holder says, goes. If you ignore that, you'll have to answer to the law.
It's no surprise, then, that the bill isn't enormously popular. The machinery of full-blown public outrage is grinding its way into gear, spearheaded by academics and lawyers who blog prolifically for a ready audience. Online culture is predisposed to making a gigantic stink over certain issues, and this is one of them.
There's no guarantee that an unpopular bill from a minority government (designed to placate a globally loathed American administration, no less) will get enacted. If it does, will it really turn Canadians into a country of peaceable DRM-abiding peasants with no aspirations for their digital media beyond what the fine print stipulates?
I doubt it. Laura Murray, a Queen's University professor and co-author of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen's Guide says the reaction will likely be two-pronged. Older users might be cautious, and people working in risk-averse institutions like universities or corporations will feel a chill from above, especially as the software tools that can be used to rip DVDs will become harder to come by.
But the younger generation will continue to follow its own mores regarding copyright, and in so doing it will embroil the country in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
This, incidentally, is where one of the government's other consumer-friendly ideas starts looking like a wooden horse full of lawyers. The bill stipulates that certain statutory penalties for copyright infringement will be lowered to $500, down from the current legislation that can see people run up fines of tens of thousands.
It's a fantastic piece of strategy. As the American experience has demonstrated, if you want a public-relations fiasco on your hands, sue a single mother (or a 12-year-old, or a puppy) for an obscene amount of money. But $500 is a fine that flies beneath the media's carefully honed outrage radar. It's the kind of fee that's easier to pay than to fight — and that's what people will do.
If we bump along peaceably in this society of ours, it's because there's an alignment between our laws and our everyday understanding of what's right and fair. In this case, the government is trying to reshape that understanding where it comes to digital media, and the bill seems doomed to failure. Rather than bringing Canadians around, it will — in the words of University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist — "undermine respect for copyright law itself."
Murray has a better idea: lawmakers should outline what constitutes "fair dealing," and work back from there. Clarify whether Canadians are entitled to use media for criticism, reporting, parody, education or personal use. If they are, then it shouldn't matter whether a digital lock was broken in the process.
Most people understand the law in terms of rules that ensure moral behaviour, not the act of obeying magical locks that will unleash expensive curses if cracked. Shaking Canadians out of their improvised understanding of digital copyright isn't a bad thing. But I'd just as soon not awaken from my reverie to discover a nightmare.
