Elizabeth Haggarty
Toronto Star
We are pirates.
Among the leagues of China, Indonesia and Russia, Canada remains on the International Intellectual Property Alliance’s (IIPA) 2011 Priority Watch when it comes to aiding and abetting copyright infringements.
“Overall the piracy picture in Canada is at least as bleak as it was a year ago, and it is cementing its reputation as a haven where technologically sophisticated international piracy organizations can operate with virtual impunity,” the report reads.
And while 99 per cent of Argentineans maybe getting their music illegally, we’re hosting the banks of tunes they are plundering.
Are you feeling a little embarrassed as you download a torrent of The King’s Speech, your laptop propped up on the photocopies you made of your class textbook, instead of forking over $200 for it? (Yes, we’re renowned for that, too.)
While the Canadian government has tinkered with curbing our illegal download desires, the IIPA is not impressed with our copyright legislation, calling the latest attempt, last year’s Bill C-32, “insufficient and deeply flawed.”
So, why are we pariahs in the copyright world?
Our main infringements occur in the online world of “cyberlockers.” Cyberlockers allow users to store and share files by acting as servers where people can store and share pirated movies, music, games and software.
Canada hosts two of the world’s largest cyberlockers: Hotfile.com, which has 17,510 sites linking to mostly from Japan and ISOhunt.com, which has 5,991 sites linking to it, mostly from the U.S. and Australia.
The report also criticizes Canada for inadequate enforcement and penalties in our copyright infringement law. When people are found guilty of copyright infringements for non-commercial purposes they can be fined a maximum of $5,000, no matter how many files they illegally copied or downloaded.
And we don’t crack down on the ISPs hosting pirated materials. Canada is currently home to the majority of the world’s top ten BitTorrent sites
“It seems that a party who “provides digital memory” for use by others “for the purpose of allowing the telecommunication of a work through the Internet or another digital network” can never be liable for infringing activity that it hosts, unless it knows that a court has adjudged the user’s conduct to be infringing,” the report reads.
Canadian students aren’t off the hook, either. The report also points to Canada for our “high-volume photocopying, and unauthorized uploading and downloading (especially of textbooks).”
