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 Technology News | February 2007 
U.S. Group Wants Canada Blacklisted Over Piracy
 Barrie Mckenna - Globe and Mail
| | Counterfeit DVDs. (AP) |
A powerful coalition of U.S. software, movie and music producers is urging the Bush administration to put Canada on an infamous blacklist of intellectual property villains, alongside China, Russia and Belize.
Canada's chronic failure to modernize its copyright regime has made it a global hub for bootleg movies, pirated software and tiny microchips that allow video-game users to bypass copyright protections, the International Intellectual Property Alliance complains in a submission to the U.S. government.
The time has come for the United States to send a stern warning to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, which has failed to deliver on a promised overhaul of copyright laws and a policing crackdown, said the Washington-based group that represents companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Paramount Pictures.
“The industry groups feel very strongly that we need to ratchet this up,” IIPA legal counsel Steve Metalitz said
“The disturbing thing is that the Canadian government doesn't seem to take this very seriously.”
He pointed out that the Harper government hasn't even drafted new copyright legislation.
The United States first placed Canada on a lower-priority watch list three years ago. Elevating Canada to the “priority watch list,” as the U.S. industry now wants, would put it among a select group of notorious copyright pirates, such as Belize, Venezuela, China, Turkey, Indonesia, Ukraine and Russia.
“Canada's long tenure on the USTR watch list seems to have had no discernible effect on its copyright policy,” the group lamented in a submission this week to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, George W. Bush's trade czar.
Once put on notice, failure to address U.S. concerns could result in trade challenges at the World Trade Organization, plus possible sanctions.
Officials at Industry Canada, which oversees copyright laws, would not directly address the U.S. industry's concerns yesterday, nor would they say when new legislation might be ready.
“The government of Canada is working actively on the copyright file and will take the time necessary to ensure that revisions to this important framework legislation have been fully thought through,” Industry Canada spokesman David Dummer said.
The complaint says Canada has emerged as “a leading exporter” of bootlegged copies of the latest movies as well as so-called mod chips, which are used to circumvent anti-piracy technology built into popular video game consoles, such as Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Game Cube.
“The problem of unauthorized camcording of films in Canadian theatres is now nearing crisis levels,” the group complained. It estimates that in 2006 as many as a quarter of all bootlegged films sold worldwide were made in Canada.
Unlike in the United States and most other developed countries, videotaping movies in theatres is not illegal in Canada. Likewise, there is no law in Canada that specifically bans mod chips and other piracy tools, as there is in the United States.
Making and distributing the chips has become so lucrative that the thriving business is now dominated by organized-crime rings, including the Hells Angels in Quebec and the Big Circle Boys in Ontario and British Columbia, according to the IIPA.
“Highly organized international-crime groups have rushed into the gap left by Canada's outmoded copyright law and now use the country as a springboard from which to undermine legitimate markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere,” the group said.
The industry paints a grim picture of Canada as a country where copyright pirates operate with impunity because of lax laws, poor enforcement and a laissez-faire attitude.
“Canada remains far behind virtually all of its peers in the industrialized world with respect to its efforts to bring its copyright laws up to date with the realities of the global digital networked environment,” the group argued in its submission.
“Indeed, even the major developing countries have progressed further and faster than Canada in meeting the challenge.”
A spokesman for Ms. Schwab, the U.S. trade czar, was not immediately available for comment. |
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