Part 2 of 3
Detractors may decry the Copyright Modernization Act as the "evil little brother" of controversial American anti-piracy legislation but updating the national copyright laws was long overdue, according to a top researcher of intellectual property laws.
While critics have been comparing Bill C-11 to the U.S.'s delayed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Dr. Teresa Scassa, Canada research chair for information law, said the recently approved amendments were a long time coming, but that they make up for a "much older generation of copyright reform."
It took four bills and three elections before a federal government managed to get copyright modernization through the House of Commons, beginning with Bill C-60 in 2005.
Bill C-11 attempts to bring in line the rights of copyright holders and consumers in a digital age that's far different from the era when the last copyright law was enacted 15 years ago.
One of the major updates makes it legal for audiences to do what they've been doing since the invention of recordable materials. While there have been previous allowances made for copying music onto CDs - and levies imposed on blank media to compensate copyright holders - it was never technically legal to move music from a CD onto a computer hard drive or from your iTunes to your MP3 player.
The bill now provides for format shifting, where a consumer can make a legal copy of a work they already own but with a few important details.
And the devil is in those details, said Scassa, a professor at the University of Ottawa.
"You can't borrow a DVD or a CD from a friend and make a copy. You can't borrow one from the library and make a copy. And you have to destroy your format-shifted copy if you sell the original or give it to somebody else," she said.
The bill also makes it legal to use the PVRs that cable companies have been selling for years, so long as you're not recording a show that's available on demand or keeping it for longer than it takes to watch it at a more convenient time - meaning you can't backlog a whole season of True Blood to watch when all the other shows are on winter hiatus.
But despite the gains, one thing remains paramount - even though it's legal to format shift, you can't break a digital lock to do it.
Media is commonly protected with some form of digital rights management (DRM) tool, making it difficult for things to be shared or copied.
In the early days of peer-to-peer file sharing, record labels applied DRM to CDs, which made them impossible to rip onto your computer to upload online. At least until computer-savvy users created programs to open these digital locks.
Although music companies abandoned DRM-protected CDs and digital downloads, these locks can still be found on movie discs, making the ability to format shift nearly moot.
The use and creation of programs that break digital locks are also prohibited under the copyright act.
"Digital locks trump all of our rights," said Prince George Public Library head Allan Wilson. "Corporate rights are beginning to supersede individual rights."
Wilson said that theoretically copyright owners, like American-based film and music corporations, can put a lock on anything they've created, which would allow them to establish what consumers can do with content they've already purchased.
He also pointed out that the new digital lock provisions are stricter than ones in the United States, which has exceptions for the types of uses covered under fair use - similar to the Canadian fair dealing clause that covers schools, libraries, museums and archives.
For example, in the U.S. a film professor can break a lock on a movie to copy a scene to show as part of a lecture.
Scassa agreed there is a sense of American pressure on the Canadian rules as they pertain to digital locks, but that there were definitely "things in there for the user community as well that weren't on an American shopping list of copyright reform measures that every state should implement."
One of these Canadian exceptions is the new found legality for user-generated content. Also known as the YouTube exception, users can create something for fun that uses copyrighted material and broadcast it as long as they're not making money.
For example, aspiring DJs can now legally post their mashups and proud parents can publicize their video montages of their kids set to their favourite Spice Girls songs.
The American SOPA would have allowed the U.S. government to block websites illegally hosting copyrighted material. A scheduled vote was postponed on the legislation in February.
Scassa said the struggle down south is another level of copyright reform that targets online piracy.
"So we're not there yet. Now that we've passed these measures there'll be pressure brought to bear to come up to whatever the other standard is being set by our trading partners for copyright protections."
The Canadian new laws will also strike a balance between those committing copyright infringement for ease of personal use and those who are doing it to make money.
The new act sets limits on how much a copyright holder can seek in damages.
Currently, statutory damages can range from $500 to a maximum of $20,000 per work infringed.
Under Bill C-11, there would be a second tier of fines for non-commercial users, capping their amount between $100 and $5,000 for all infringements in a single case.
"It makes it less likely that major copyright owners are going to do the kinds of lawsuits they do in the United States where they go after students or grandmothers and sue them for damages for all this file sharing," said Scassa. "So if you're a non-commercial infringer, you can still be liable for copyright infringement, but you're not going to lose your house because you have a bunch of songs on your iPod that you downloaded illegally."
