Old notions” of copyright disappearing, says author of new book

In his new book, Prey To Thievery, Hill Times deputy editor Simon Doyle looks at the sway that collectives of rightsholders – most notably the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) – have held over the copyright reform process in Canada. In the book, Doyle contends that despite representing powerful corporate interests with considerable resources, copyright collectives were unsuccessful in their bids to influence policymakers due to a combination of technological advance and an inability to formulate their message in a manner that met with widespread approval. An excerpt from the book’s introduction appears below. This book is a case study on the influence of the lobbying of CRIA, or the major labels, in what can be called the pre-parliamentary and Cabinet phases in the preparation of a bill to amend the Copyright Act and implement the WIPO Internet treaties.... Amendments to the Copyright Act generally create two communities more or less aligned against one another. On one side are the rights holders, which includes writers and musicians, but their power as stakeholders comes through industrial interests such as producers, distributors and packagers of copyrighted material: the recording companies, the motion picture studios, major publishers and software companies. These industrial interests make up what we call the content or copyright industries, expressly defined as sectors of the economy that create, produce, manufacture, perform, distribute and communicate copyright-protected works. Although this side of the copyright lobby has traditionally been called the "creators" lobby, this book refers to it as the rights-holder or content lobby because it is dominated by the content industries, and because these actors are CRIA’s primary allies…. On the other side are the copyright users, or those who want greater use of and access to copyright works, and which include the public, libraries, schools, broadcasters, Internet service providers (ISPs), public and consumer interest groups, intellectuals, open source computer scientists, and in the digital environment, some hardware manufacturers, high tech and digital security companies, all of which tend to argue for less copyright protection and exceptions for various uses…. The divisions between the two camps are never hard and fast and there will always exist nuanced differences of opinion that reflect the precise interests of one organization over another. In the BCC, for example, it was felt by some that the ISPs focused on their core issue–which was the degree to which ISPs should be responsible for infringements on their networks–and which limited the coalition’s positions. Although CRIA’s political success demonstrates an age-old closeness between the corporate and political elite, the bureaucracy denied many of the maximalist copyright reforms proposed by CRIA and the rights-holder lobby. No lobby can succeed on resources alone, and despite having several advantages, such as a powerful coalition and several consultant lobbyists to arrange meetings and focus on strategy, CRIA and the rights-holder lobby could not convince the government to implement DMCA-like reforms. If lobbying is the art of communicating a persuasive argument, the recording industry had powerful communications tools at its disposal but lacked a persuasive argument to communicate. The bureaucracy was not interested in implementing controversial changes to the Copyright Act that, in addition to costing significant political capital, could do more harm than good to a competitive digital economy. The technological landscape changed so much since the adoption of the WIPO treaties in 1996 that many policy makers viewed key arguments of the recording industry as impracticable and unrealistic. While CRIA found valuable access to political power in Ottawa, and through it some success, the digital environment opened up new opportunities for the user lobby to challenge the rights holders. The public has great potential to be mobilized as a new constituency in copyright reform. Unlike CRIA, the user lobby may not have had access to a minister, but it may read the bureaucracy’s resistance to maximalist copyright reform as a signal to present its arguments to policy makers more often and with more vigour. The government’s approach to copyright revision has been, historically, to pass more provisions for rights holders, its traditional stakeholders. Policy makers resisted CRIA’s proposals during the policy process, which suggests that the digital age is eroding, however slowly, old notions of who controls copyright in Canada.

Old notions” of copyright disappearing, says author of new book

Broadcast | October 3, 2006

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us