Canada has a piracy problem – or not, depending who you ask

Canada was once again taken to task in the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)’s annual report on music piracy, released last month. The document, formally titled 2006 Piracy Report: Protecting Creativity in Music, cites numerous reasons why piracy is out of control in Canada, but as with most copyright issues, there are dissenting opinions. "We don’t have a piracy problem in Canada," says Ottawa intellectual property lawyer Howard Knopf of Macera & Jarzyna/Moffat & Co. in Ottawa. "IFPI defines practically anything as being piracy. It’s a rhetorical statement that’s over the top, it’s not particularly productive, and it’s inaccurate." Specifically, the report named Canada as one of ten priority countries based on the importance of its legitimate market, the local trend in piracy, and the degree of government action to counter the problem. Key stats listed for Canada, according to the report: more than one billion illegal downloads took place in the country in 2005, with a 33% decline in the retail value of the legal audio market between 2000 and 2005. "The Canadian government has a key role to play to address the threat to the country’s cultural and creative economy," read the report. "Canada has yet to fulfill its longstanding commitment to ratify the 1996 WIPO Treaties to protect digital copyright." Knopf points out that Canada is not committed or obliged to ratify the WIPO treaties just because it signed them. He takes further offence to the language used by IFPI, particularly use of the term illegal downloads since "in Canada it happens to be perfectly legal to download music off the Internet….Why? Because we have a private copying levy which is what asked for….So there’s no need to be hysterical and to label Canadians as pirates." The blank media levy was introduced in 1997 to distribute funds from sales of blank audio recording media like recordable CDs to copyright holders of musical works, a system that many on both sides of the copyright debate say has provided legitimacy to file-sharing and downloading. According to Michael Geist, the Canada research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, the levy has collected more than $150 million for artists and the industry. Like Knopf, Geist also took exception to the IFPI report. IFPI wrote in the 2006 report: "National surveys revealed that of those Canadians spending less on music products, by far the largest single reason cited was downloading/file sharing/CD burning." Geist, however, refers to a survey commissioned by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) more than a year ago that listed downloading (10%) as the fourth most-commonly cited reason why Canadians were spending less on music, behind price (16%), nothing of interest (14%) and lack of time (13%). After Geist wrote about the survey last March its originator, Pollara, clarified that 21% of the downloaders it surveyed cited the availability of music online as a factor in their decision to buy less music. However, with less than one quarter of professed downloaders naming that as the reason why they buy less music, it’s obvious that file sharing isn’t the only problem facing the industry. "Whatever ills are prevailing in the record industry have been shown by countless analysts have nothing to do with downloading," says Knopf. "They have to do with all kinds of other things like competition from DVDs and games, and maybe some bad talent and bad management."

Canada has a piracy problem – or not, depending who you ask

Broadcast | August 9, 2006

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