Michael Geist reports that the new Tory copyright bill mentioned in the throne speech will be tabled in the coming weeks. Given the tone of its mention in the throne speech, as well as the pressure from various content lobbies and the US government (“Blame Canada!”), it’s quite possible that this new legislation will bear at least some resemblance to the (infamous) US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

From all that I’ve read about the execution of the DMCA, I hope that our own government takes a more reasoned and balanced approach in modifying and extending our existing copyright laws. Between the reduction of practical fair use “rights”, the abuse of takedown notices, and litigation for (in my opinion) excessive damages (successfully obtaining judgment for hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a album or two worth of songs), the DMCA has some serious problems and upsets the balance between the rights of content producers and content consumers.

As fairly recently affirmed in Canada (and very recently discussed here), the rights provided by the “fair dealing” exception in the Copyright Act are part of maintaining this balance of rights between producers and consumers. As Chief Justice McLachlin noted, “[i]n order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users’ interests, [the fair dealing exception] must not be interpreted restrictively.” So let us hope that this concept of balance is in our policymakers’ and MPs’ minds as they work on this bill. And let us be prepared to stand up for our fair dealing rights if such balance is not achieved in the proposed bill. Otherwise, we might end up with our own DMCA-esque law that caters to content providers without upholding the rights of consumers to use content in a fair and reasonable fashion.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 6:06 am and is filed under Fair Copyright, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.