p2pnet.net News:- Canada’s federal heritage minister Helene Chalifour Scherrer is holding good on her promise to the Big Five record labels to do her part to stop people from sharing music online.

At a recent music industry Juno advertsing event, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin made his position clear.

“Let’s understand something – the Canadian music industry is the second most important music industry in the world,” said Martin. “It’s an important part of our sovereignty and an important part of our economy.”

At the same event, Scherrer came in with, “As minister of Canadian Heritage, I will, as quickly as possible, make changes to our copyright law.”

Now, “Scherrer intends to have the [heritage] department prepare legislation to be introduced in the fall, her communications director Marc Roy said Wednesday,” states a Canadian Press story here.

Ahhh. Now we know why Brian Robertsion and his crew over at the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) have been stepping up their efforts to make file sharing appear to be illegal in Canada.

Yesterday, in a painfully obvious put-up job, Tragically Hip denounced file sharing and recently, a music industry band called Jacksoul did the same.

Unless Big Music manages achieves in Canada what it’s acheived in the US – that’s to say ‘convince’ Canada’s political leaders to firmly back the multi-billion-dollar music industry – it’s perfeclty legal for Canadians to share their music online, as the CRIA is only too well aware having been soundly trounced in its efforts to convince Justice Konrad von Finckenstein to the contrary.

However, von Finckenstein stated, clearly and unequivocally, that putting digital music files into a computer directory which might be shared remotely by someone else isn’t copyright infringement under Canadian law.

In the meanwhile, a Heritage committee wants the government to sign two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties that would “strengthen copyright law for online property, as well as clarify the definition of distribution via peer-to-peer networks,” says the CP story.

Provisions in the treaty, signed by 44 countries including the US, “would allow music creators to use anti-copying devices that limit the number of copies made from one CD. The treaties also make it illegal to sell software that hacks through protected or locked files such as copy control technology used by EMI Canada on new CDs.

“In addition, the committee urged changes to the Copyright Act to make Internet service providers subject to liability for copyrighted material.”

There, “wasn’t enough of an option to protect copyright holders,” explained MP Sarmite Bulte, chair of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

The committee set a November 15 deadline for government, says CP, pointing out that it wasn’t clear how the upcoming federal election would affect the introduction of new copyright laws.

Martin and his government are still suffering from a scandal that saw advertising firms friendly to his party get $100 million for doing absolutely nothing, or close to it.

In the meanwhile, it may also be that although Canada’s political leaders are more than happy to dance to Big music’s tune, the citizens of the country may have other ideas.

If you’re Canadian and you want to say a few words to the people you elected and who are supposed to represent you, go here for links to MP names, emails and phone numbers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2004 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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