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p2pnet.net News:- Could it be possible that Canada will make Google or any other Internet search and archiving engines illegal?
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Could Googling become illegal?
By Jack Kapica - The Globe and Mail
Bill C-60, which amends the Copyright Act and received its first reading in the House of Commons on June 20, suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines.
Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, of the law firm of Macera & Jarzyna Moffat & Co., has been poring over the bill since it was tabled, and says he was startled to discover the potentially negative effect of Bill C-60’s provisions on "information location tools."
The phrasing of the proposed law is difficult, Mr. Knopf says, because at first glance it seems to be a helpful provision in that it limits the liability of companies such as Google to no more than an injunction when they have not received actual notice of infringement. But then the language of the bill works on the assumption that the search engine itself is capable of infringing copyright by having archived copyright material on it.
Section 40.3 (1) of the bill states that "the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter."
That section, he says, implies that "information location tools" would infringe copyright if they archive any material that is copyright, not just material that is itself infringing.
The bill defines information location tools as "any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network."
Search engines in the United States, Mr. Knopf says, have been tested to some extent on this issue, notably for the use of thumbnail photographs. The courts have been leaning in the direction of finding that the material on them is intended for "fair use," meaning it is not in competition with any copyright work.
But Bill C-60 suggests that Parliament considers such archiving activity is illegal.
"Not all people agree with me," says Mr. Knopf. But he adds that either way it is interpreted, it could lead to a court case.
"The way it is drafted strongly suggests that the reproduction and caching activity done by Google or the Wayback Machine at archive.org and similar essential research tools would be illegal in Canada," he says. "It could be read by a court as a ‘deeming’ provision, which was hopefully not the intention."
But "if the provision is intended to shelter the providers of ‘information location tools,’ it might have the opposite effect and end up being a Trojan Horse. At the very least, it could turn search and archive engine providers into enforcers for alleged copyright owners, some of whom will surely use their notice powers for abusive purposes. Or it may be a wedge for yet another instance of a tariff to be collected by an aggressive copyright collective."
But, cautions Mr. Knopf, Bill C-60 has received first reading only, and that "there"s a lot of time for them to take this out or to fix it."
He warns that "we shouldn’t cripple the Googles of the world by imposing copyright chill on the very basis of their architecture. In fact, they perform a very useful service to copyright owners by enabling easy detection of infringement. The owners should go after the actual infringer, rather than effectively shooting the messenger."
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July 14th, 2005 at 1:50 am
As you are seeing here is part of the problem in the US. Our legislators are so busy playing politics that things like this slide through without contention. With a total majority in both house and senate, many bills are cobbled together without dual partisan support and then rushed to the vote with very limited time to discover what exactly is in the bill. Laying 10 preposed bills totally 900 pages each on a legislators desk and saying we vote in two days doesn’t leave time to discover all the tricks buried in the writing. If it looks good on the top, it should be good in the depths, eh? Wrong.
We need a total kick of all parties in the US and an independent party for a turn in the White House, if for no other reason than to declare that the voters have had enough and that politics is about running the country, not running the country into the ground. A steady onslaught of just such bills has resulted in much of what the US has today in laws. Those that were purchased straight out, had well known problems as the one mentioned above and the open and close quick ramrod vote doesn’t leave time to fix it. Nor does the lack of involvement with both parties in the crafting help either.
I for one am tired of seeing the country go to hell in a handbasket as our legislators cater to the corporations at the expense of the citzen. Without our aid they can’t stay in office long enough to do the damage they are doing now. I for one say vote every Washington critter out of there and put totally new faces in. Term limits to go with it so that political dynasties can’t be formed.
From one that is fed up and had enough…
July 14th, 2005 at 2:59 am
If i had enough money i’d patent the concept of “encoding information in visual symbols capable of being placed onto a 2 dimensional surface”.
Then when the patent office sent me the letter informing me that i’d succeeded, i’d sue them for breaching my patent on writing… Because that’s what it would be. And hieroglyphics etc etc etc.
As long as i applied for it with the US patent office i have no doubt the morons would grant it. Hell i’d probly get it past most of the other patent offices around the world too.
July 14th, 2005 at 7:27 am
WEBSITE ARCHIVING IS GOOD! ANYONE THAT SAYS OTHERWISE, OBVIOUSLY HAS NEVER USED/NEEDED ONE!
July 15th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
See my letter to the editor about this article: http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050713.gtgooglelter0713/BNStory/Technology/
We all need to realize who the beneficiaries of these overly-complex laws are, and that is the incumbent old-media intermediaries. Having web-pages on the anonymous part of the Internet be able to be cached, mirrored, indexed and viewed without additional payment or permission is major competition for the old-media content industry who believe that all creativity must have per-unity royalty payments. These incumbent special interests want to eradicate all competition by forcing everyone to use their business model, and to only be able to use technologies which they control.
This is a 10+ year old debate now that was launched in the USA by the USPTO with their “Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure” from 1995
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/doc/ipnii/
Simplistic logic: unless all new media was modified legally and technically to retain the limitations of the old media (primarily centralized control), then no content would be created. While this is obviously nonsense, governments have been buying into this nonsense with Canada’s Bill C-60 just being the latest round.
Whether the new-media genie is put back into the bottle is up to us. We must get politically involved and turn this mess around.
February 3rd, 2007 at 2:39 am
Of course the intent of this bill is (hopefully) to protect search engines and archiving tools such as WebCite [http://www.webcitation.org] (a Canadian-made counterpart of the Internet Archive). Thus, the headline of this article and the way this bill is discussed in the media is misleading.