Ottawa copyright circles are buzzing with hints that the government is preparing its new revised copyright bill, and will be tabling it soon, perhaps as early as next week.

And the buzz is that the new law will basically be a copy of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Much in the as-yet-unseen bill will not be too surprising, considering that its primary intent is to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization Performances and Phonograms treaties adopted in December, 1996, and signed by Canada a year later. That was also the basis of the DMCA.

Further, informed sources are getting steamed already. In his blog, copyright lawyer and litigator Howard Knopf is predicting that the bill will “put digital locks on our computers, cellphones, iPods, other gadgets and tools and, ultimately, our culture,” just like the DCMA does. He goes on to speculate that the bill would make it a copyright infringement (as it is in the United States) to try to remove Digital Rights Management and Technical Protection Measures from your computer, such as the infamous Sony anti-infringing technology of a few years ago that was based on a very dangerous hacker’s tool called a “rootkit.”

Actually, a highly placed source told me today that technical protection measures will definitely be included, simply because the WIPO treaties demanded them.

Michael Geist, another Ottawa copyright lawyer and Toronto Star columnist, also said legislation seems to be near, and an article in the Ottawa Citizen by Dierdre McMurdy supported the speculation after consultations among U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins, Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner, all of whom apparently had a big hand in fashioning the proposed legislation.

The biggest worry for the non-aligned copyright community is that the big four (non-Canadian) record companies would be able to sue Canadians who they believe are sharing music files over the Internet, a practice based on the U.S. model, in which the recording industry has decided the best way to handle the digital music revolution is to sue their customers.

There are many groups that a new copyright bill will affect, among them teachers who want to photocopy excerpts of books for their students, TV and film producers, radio managers who pay copyright fees for the music they play, book publishers and a host of others.

The people most interested in new legislation will be, of course, the music recording executives, who have been in a state of extreme agitation since the arrival of Napster in 1999. The industry claimed the peer-to-peer file-sharing system that Napster spawned was almost solely responsible for the decline in sales of compact discs.

The Ottawa copyright buzz suggests that the new bill might indeed contain all the elements of the DMCA, on which the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) based its demands through intense lobbying of the Canadian government.

And that’s where the serious problem lies.

Specifically, the record industry  itself has changed mightily in the past decade. It has relented in its fight against digital music sales, and a couple of the big labels are now actively selling their wares online, which they would have called unthinkable just a few years ago.

Another issue is whether the music industry’s demands are based on sound evidence. In the past month, a respectable government department has thrown doubt on the kind of damage the recording industry claims to have suffered. Industry Canada, one of the two ministries that might emerge as the sponsor of the copyright bill (the other is Heritage Canada), commissioned a stringent study that suggested file-sharing actually helps music sales; this conclusion has been challenged by University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz. But surely the issue should be more thoroughly thrashed out before the government makes a serious move.

A lot has changed in the decade since Napster sent the recording industry into a panic, including a large body of evidence exposing the poorly planned DMCA’s unintended consequences documented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I hope that Industry Canada and Heritage Canada have taken recent history to heart, and considered deeply the incredibly fluid landscape that technology has placed under the copyright debate.