User:Odemia/Sandbox/Copyright Consultation Submission
From Pirate Party of Canada
This is a draft of my submission for the copy right consultation. Please take freely.
How Canada’s Copyright Act affects me
The phenomenal creative potential of people around the globe and here in Canada is being discovered in a way that it has never before been. Until the 1990's the commercial distribution of creative works required costly distribution networks. Now with the internet and peer-to-peer technologies, any individual with an internet connection can realize their potential. As an engineer, computer scientist, graduate student and amateur musician, I not only consume research, music, movies, paintings, photos, computer programs, books but I have and will continue to produce many forms of creative works throughout my life. Importantly, I also now have the ability to distribute my works online to a global audience just as large as any distributor.
It is the collective awareness that we, Canadians and citizens of the internet, are no longer just consumers but producers of innovation and art that should be driving change in the Copyright Act. The law, having been crafted in an era when litigation between large distributors made sense, no longer serves us well. The citizens of the internet are now equal to big distributors in ability produce, distribute and have creative works used by others without consent. However, through complexity, lack of clarity and need for litigation copyright laws create inequality between citizens by failing to provide the same protection to the creative works of individuals that it does to those of large distributors.
There is a growing generation, myself included, that feels powerless to compete. The music I create, the software I write and the research I do may be unique and valuable. Yet I live in fear that I may be liable for copyrights infringement for borrowing a line of code in a computer program, a chart or short clip for a research presentation or a drum beat I sample in my music. Like many others the idea of being a criminal for trying to create is absurd to me, especially when I lack the ability to protect my works in the same way. I do not posses the finances to hire a lawyer to clear samples or snippets of code or have the resources to track down where my works have been used and take legal action. The creativity and innovation of people like myself risks not being shared because of the threat of loosing everything.
Adding to the frustration of individuals are the continued attempts by many to assert that copyright is a right to ownership the same as the right to owning any physical piece of property. This completely ignores the original intent of copyright systems. The tradition of copyright which dates back to 1710 and the Statute of Anne was not about creating rights for creators to own their works. This statue was about breaking the monopolies that had been unfairly given out by the crown while maintaining a mechanism for publishers and authors to seek remuneration for their effort. The Statute of Anne achieved this by giving publishers the privilege of limited time monopolies in order to make the production and distribution of creative works economically viable. Today, the economic life of the vast majority of creative works is short. Software is outdated within a year, box office sales are measured in days, an increasing ratio of games are sold prior to release and the vast majority of books have all their print runs within a year or two of the first publication, yet the copyright terms continue to lock up what is no longer economically valuable but has immense cultural value for life time of the author plus fifty years.
How are we to respect a system that has drifted so far from it's intent? Copyright is supposed to encourage creativity and innovation, yet it not only fails to protect ability to seek financial remuneration by being out of reach but also threatens my creativity and innovation by placing legal monopolies on the very building blocks I would use to create.
How laws can be changed to be more effective and withstand the test of time
Updating Canada's copyright laws should not be about updating copyright to new technology but instead focus on returning respect to the system. Respect can transcend technological changes where technologically specific regulations have no hope of remaining useful. A system that everyone has a vested interest in upholding will be easier and cheaper to police than a system that fails to protect the growing mass of creators and "distributors". By bringing equality back to copyright, it would be assured that everyone has vested interest in obeying the rules set out in the system. The four main features that need to be incorporated into Canada's copyright system to achieve this are:
- Accessibility
- Every individual must be able to seek and receive the same protection for their creative works.
- Clarity in Fair Dealings
- Fair Dealings is a grey area in the law, too often lawyers are required to sort out the grey areas. Having to turning to a lawyer is a stumbling block for start-ups or individual creators and should be an absolute last resort not a starting point in the creative process.
- Renewable 5-10 year copyright terms
- The commercial life of creative works is short; Copyright should only provide control of the work long enough to provide a chance for remuneration and then acknowledge societies' ownership of it's culture and right to remix it.
- Rebuild the public domain
- As creative works are adopted and consumed, they become part of society’s culture, the foundation of new innovation and creativity. Einstein explained this best when he said, “we stand on the shoulders of giants.” The public domain form the shoulders of the giants, it is the current creators and innovators that need a healthy public domain to base their works on.
The inability of the so many citizens to navigate the copyright system and protect their works under the Act causes many to see the system as creating classes within society: those who can wield copyright versus those that can't wield copyright. It is this double standard that causes people to loose respect for the laws of copyright. In order to rebuild respect for the Act it must be simplified, and streamlined. Registration processes need to be accessible and should be mandatory for works to be protected. This is not only about making copyright protection more accessible but also about reconnecting the creator or copyright holder to the work. Problems associated with contacting an author who is deceased or who has transferred copyright are eliminated when there is a registrar that maintains this information.
Clarity within Fair Dealing is of particular importance. Fair Dealing is a grey area within the law, and by it's nature it often requires professional advise to navigate. Simply expanding Fair Dealings is only a band-aid solution to giving people access to criticize, create satires and remix controlled works. Without clarity use of Fair Dealing will still only be accessible to those that can afford a lawyer to defend their Fair Dealings. Fair Dealings needs to be clarified to allow satirists and documentary film makers the ability to create without needing legal advice.
It is in the interest of Canada and the world to have information property law that enables creators to seek remuneration for their creative efforts while providing a rich accessible cultural and scientific heritage in the form of public domain. Normally monopolies would be entirely prevented, but limited time monopolies protected by the governments in order to give creators a means to seek remuneration for their efforts have worked well in the past and should continue to be used. But these monopolies must be reasonable, in all but a small percentage of works there is not enough commercial value to warrant distribution after two years. Based on this the length of commercial monopolies provided by copyright laws should be reduced to five to ten years. This provides more than adequate time to seek financial remuneration for creative effort while ensuring that works fall into the public domain as soon as possible.
There is an increasing wealth of studies showing that increasing the control on information property does not correlate to increased output. In fact much of the evidence shows the opposite, a strengthened public domain leads to more competition to create. If Canada is to compete globally, we must start be strengthening our public domain. Strong competition to create and sell cultural and scientific works domestically will help Canada compete in the global market for creativity.
Fostering innovation, creativity, competition and investment in Canada's digital economy
The digital economy should be led through fostering innovation, creativity, competition and investment in Canada. And all of these should be pursued by providing a frame work that respects the equality of all Canadians as creative, innovative, competitive people worthy of having their creativity protected. In order for this to be possible, we as a nation must start by acknowledging the current technological reality and our limited ability to control works.
The most prominent torrent tracker The Pirate Bay, which has been targeted of many accusation of theft of intellectual property for enabling people to share files, recently released figures showing their monthly operating costs where around $3,000 US. In other words the cost of distributing books, movies and music on an international scale using the internet can be done for approximately $36,000 per year. If the content industries international distribution models can be subverted on such a large scale for only $36,000 per year, the industries' distribution models needs to change. However, because we have given out ridiculous monopolies on copyright works that span generations, the content industries have developed an ill-formed sense of right to control works without adapting or innovating their distribution models. It is time to open up copyright and force the industries to be innovative and competitive.
Section 1.1 of Canada's Competition Act states the goal “to maintain and encourage competition in Canada in order to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy”. If it were not for the Copyright Act the Competition Act would be used against the incumbent distributors for failing to adapt and be more efficient. Instead government is being lobbied to strengthen the Copyright Act to the point where the Competition Act will be useless over the entire content industry. The balance between the Copyright Act and the Competition Act is gone, yet for some reason our government and governments around the world continue to sign and ratify treaties that reinforce monopolies on creative works and even lengthen their terms. This displays ignorance for the short commercial life of all but a few creative works and the purpose for the Competition Act and other anti-trust laws.
Many of the incumbents within the content industry are calling for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and others to monitor and police what files people access online. The cost both in money and in loss of personal freedoms of these types of systems would be immense. Many argue that such systems would only record which files had been shared, when in reality these types of systems would have to record all online actions. All online banking transactions, medical searches, purchases, chatting with friends and relatives would all be recorded and held in databases in order to enforce these systems.
The collection and aggregation of personal information has been referred to as "personal plutonium", for how mundane a single piece of information can be while how dangerous and valuable the aggregated information is when refined into a database. When large amounts of data are aggregated like this it is very easy to not only determine which computer was accessing what files at what time but build a profile for each person that uses a given computer. In short, these databases will become the prime targets of anyone who wants to misuse the information: identity thieves, telemarketers, governments cracking down on political decent or anyone else that would find a complete identities and profiles valuable.
Rather than risk privacy and spend large sums of money trying to control how people use information, we should instead update our laws and distribution. The goals of new laws should be to be enforceable by being respected. And respect should be achieved by making protection for creative works as accessible to a high-school band or kid with a video camera as they are to Hollywood or big business. If the "consumer" was truly able to seek equal protection for their creativity as business then the "consumer" would have a vested interest in respecting copyright. The letter of the law currently provides this, but the cost of litigation and complexity of proving a work is yours without a contract or registration makes equality a pragmatic fallacy.
We as a nation must stop signing away our potential and instead remind our neighbours and trading partners where copyright comes from and form new treaties that acknowledge the true purpose of the copyright. Rather than bringing down the iron fist on people who are already crying "injustice", why not create a sane copyright system, with equal access in exchange for respect of the system? By limiting copyright terms to something that makes sense in terms of creator's remuneration, making the system accessible to all, ensuring Fair Dealing and clarifying the laws, millions if not billions of dollars would be saved, new investments would be seen in updating distribution and a huge loss of privacy rights could be avoided.
This is Canada's opportunity to be a leader in finding new economic paths for the content industries and creating new international agreements. However, if we are not innovative in the laws that back distribution, we will only prevent our distribution channels from innovating and in turn Canada will miss out on chances to find new audiences for Canadian creative works. The privacy of individuals, ensuring creators receive their share and the cost of monitoring are significant hurdles in the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) proposed idea for monetizing peer-to-peer file sharing. However it is this kind of innovative business plan that acknowledges: the technological reality, the creators need for remuneration and consumers habits that can make Canada a leader in the digital economy.
