OTTAWA – The implementation of new copyright legislation is likely to have little immediate impact on the Canadian communications sector, a panel at the International Institute of Communications Canadian chapter conference heard yesterday.
The session looked at the impacts on industry after Bill C-11, The Copyright Modernization Act, becomes law. Asked whether the world will change drastically, panelists said not to expect many major shifts from what’s taking place right now.
“Will the sky fall when this bill is passed? No. But there will be unintended consequences. There are things that haven’t been looked at, things that the government has to put their mind to very soon,” said Paul Spurgeon, VP of legal service and general counsel, at the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). “There will be issues that arise as a result of this bill, and there have been a number of parties who I think could be affected, whose ox is gored by this bill and others that won’t. So it remains to be seen. I think time will tell.”
Ariel Thomas, an associate with the law firm Fasken Martineau DuMoulin, agreed with Spurgeon, noting the impacts may not be felt for 10 years and that’s because the technologically neutral nature of the bill, highlighting the use of network service providers rather than ISPs and information location tools instead of search engines.
“Examples like this work for now because it’s obvious the legislators had specific activities in mind that they wanted to exempt, but we don’t really know what new technologies are going to come along that could also fit into that,” she said.
Jeremy de Beer, associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, pointed out that changes to the current copyright regime will affect different parts of the communications sector differently. “For content creators and content industries, copyright is incredibly important, it’s THE issue. And for collective societies, it’s essentially their raison d’être. So changes are likely to have a much more significant effect in that sector,” he said. “But for the computer and communications industries more broadly, copyright is an issue, and so it’s more like putting out a fire.”
The Ottawa U professor noted that it’s also important to realize that copyright alone won’t promote or encourage innovation and creativity, but it can slow them down by itself. “If we get it wrong on copyright, the implications are incredibly significant. Even getting a perfect copyright policy in place won’t solve all of our problems, but making even a small mistake in copyright policy can actually create new problems,” he said.
Stephen Zolf, partner with Heenan Blaikie, said the new copyright legislation is much ado about nothing. Consumer and business behaviour are impervious to rules, he noted, adding that 15 years after the U.S. introduced its first digital copyright legislation, upwards of 25% of all online content is still be distributed without rights holders’ permission. “There is a bit of a virtual jaywalking problem here… where current [rules] are often ignored by consumers and others for either efficiency reasons or just consumer preference issues. I’m certainly not saying that the passage of the Copyright Modernization Act would have no impact, not at all. It’s just that we have to be somewhat skeptical when we hear people saying the sky will fall if we don’t do anything or conversely the sky will fall if we pass the bill as-is with all its supposed flaws or its supposed twists and turns.”
The copyright picture in Canada will get a lot clearer in the near future as the Supreme Court of Canada gets set to hear five copyright cases. Two cases revolve around the communication to the public of music and another two focus on fair dealing. In the latter, the Copyright Board of Canada said a 30-second preview of song was considered research, but took the opposite approach in a case involving the photocopying of sections of a book in saying it wasn’t.
