Breaking the digital encryption on a movie DVD – even if copying it for personal use – would make individual Canadians liable for legal damages of up to $5,000 under a tougher copyright law proposed by the Harper government Wednesday.
The legislation, sponsored by federal Industry Minister Tony Clement, seeks to put more teeth in copyright law for those who make software, movies and other creative works and have seen their intellectual property increasingly pirated around the globe.
At the same time, the bill tries to soften the blow for consumers by legalizing commonplace but grey-area practices such as backing up the contents of a music CD, home recording of TV episodes for later viewing or copying legally acquired music to a digital player.
The centerpiece of the legislation, however, is the Conservative proposal to put new legal heft behind the digital locks, or encryption, that copyright holders place on products such as movies, video games and electronic books. It would make it illegal to crack these in most cases, including for personal use.
This trumps consumer rights and means, for instance, that allowances for Canadians to back up or duplicate copyrighted works for personal use disappear if a digital lock is present.
The Tories held a press conference on the bill at the Montreal office of a U.S. video-game software developer Wednesday, a move intended to drive home the message that cracking down on copyright infringement protects investment in Canada.
“For those companies that choose to use digital locks as part of their business model, they will have the protection of the law,” Mr. Clement said.
He noted with approval, however, that one creative sector, the music industry, has moved away from digital locks after deciding that “punishing the consumer … is not a good business model.”
The minority Harper government, which will require the support of one opposition party to pass the legislation, said jobs like the ones at Electronic Arts in Montreal depend on solid copyright protections. It was a none-too-subtle suggestion for the Official Opposition Liberals, if not the Bloc Québécois, that failure to pass the bill could hurt investment in the vote-rich province.
The legislation targets big online pirates instead of individual Canadian freeloaders and would in fact lighten rather than increase maximum legal penalties for those who illegally download or upload copyrighted works on the Internet for non-commercial reasons.
The government is proposing to scale back the total legal damages that individual Canadians could incur for piracy of goods for personal use: reducing these to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringing activity, from an existing ceiling of up to $20,000 per protected work.
Instead, the bill would go after the big fish in Internet copyright infringement, giving copyright owners stronger legal tools to shut down “pirate websites” in Canada that support file-sharing and introducing a separate criminal penalty of up to $1-million for serious cases where commercially motivated pirates crack digital encryption.
The Tories are also expanding a limited list of exceptions where Canadians will be able to break copyright for legal reasons, adding parody and satire and limited allowances for education.
In what might be called the YouTube exemption, Canadians also will be free to create video “mash-ups” that borrow from commercial works for posting online.
Ottawa is trying to update copyright law – which hasn’t seen substantial amendments since 1997 – to reflect its obligations under international accords that have been toughened in the past decade.
