Canada is ‘Safe Haven’ for Internet Pirates, Hill Antipiracy Caucus Says
Canada and Spain found themselves the targets of especially harsh criticism from the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus at a Hill event Wednesday. Familiar countries on its new “watch list” of nations with lax copyright enforcement include China and Russia, and Mexico was praised for improving enforcement but criticized for lacking “deterrent-level penalties.” Previous caucus reports have criticized Canada’s failure to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties, and the U.S. Trade Representative this year put Canada on the government’s “priority” piracy list for the first time (WID May 4 p3).
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The American “assembly line” now cranks out music, movies, books and other copyrighted works, said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. “The U.S. copyright industry deserves the same protection of law” that dealers get when cars are stolen from their lots. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a songwriter with gold- and platinum-selling albums, said he learned that his own music was often pirated. “To these kids, [if] it’s online, they consider it to be free.” He seemed to suggest the Amazon Kindle was an emerging vehicle for piracy, but an aide later clarified that Hatch -- a Kindle owner himself -- was using the device as an example of a legitimate platform for content that young people can’t distinguish from illicit content. Copyright industries face a “multibillion if not trillion [dollar] set of problems,” Hatch said.
The Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons, screened for lawmakers at the MPAA in Washington this week, was their favorite example of a threatened work. The film is already available illegally on Web sites hosted in Spain and Canada, Schiff said. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., called it a “fabulous movie” that may have cost $200 million to make -- a sum that would be hard to finance if movies continue to be infringed as heavily as they have been. Studios should “reconsider” how much they film in Canada if the country doesn’t change its copyright laws, he said. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the newest co-chairman of the caucus, said his state brought in $48 million from studios in 2007. Referring to Hatch’s piracy losses, Goodlatte said “it’s good that we have a victim amongst our leadership.”
Canada stands alone among major trading partners in lacking legislation or “developed jurisprudence” that helps rights holders protect their works online, such as through a legal framework governing ISPs’ responsibilities, the caucus watch list said. It’s a “safe haven” for Internet pirates, with a “seeming unwillingness” to deter them through stiff penalties, and the country’s personal-use exception has been read to protect unauthorized downloading.
In language often reserved for Sweden, home to the Pirate Bay P2P site, the report said Spain has “essentially decriminalized” file-sharing, where it’s now an “acceptable cultural phenomenon.” Because of “inadequate implementation” of European Union-level policies on ISP duties, Spanish providers use file-sharing as a draw for subscribers, and rights holders’ negotiations with them to create a “legitimate” market haven’t borne fruit, it said. Lawmakers cited Taringa.net as a popular site in Spain. Despite Mexican law enforcement’s “high level” of cooperation with rights holders, the country is plagued by high online piracy and illegal camcording, and officials lack the power to shut down well-known pirate marketplaces on their own initiative, the report said.
Chinese authorities have “inexplicably refrained” from using their power to apply administrative penalties against infringing Web sites, the report said. Fines have been issued liberally against physical infringement and shown little effect, but they could work for file-storage, user- generated content and deep-linking sites, it said. Piracy “fully contaminates” the Internet in China, Goodlatte said. Baidu.com, which runs a popular MP3 search engine, was singled out as responsible for the “vast majority” of illicit music downloading. The report said the “modest improvement” in China’s software piracy rate, falling to 80 percent -- at the low end of the worst countries in the Business Software Alliance’s recent report (WID May 13 p2) -- didn’t discount the need for criminal penalties for end-user software piracy.
Once the most public target of USTR -- for unlicensed download store AllofMP3.com (WID Oct 10/06 p7), which gave rise to a series of clones when it shut down in 2007 -- Russia was criticized mostly as slow to carry out its 2006 intellectual property rights agreement with the U.S. The report said Russia should quickly create a system for licensing optical discs and give officials the power to go after infringement on their own, as required in the agreement. “Rogue” royalty-collection societies of the kind supported by AllofMP3, though statutorily required for the past year to get state accreditation, are still operating without any state interference, it said. Partly this is the result of “prolonged delays in proper accreditation” that make it difficult to establish a society’s legitimacy. The latest AllofMP3.com clone is GoMusic.ru, lawmakers said. It claims to pay royalties to the same society that AllofMP3 did.
MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman went easier than lawmakers on Canada, saying at the event that film studios are in talks with government officials on closing legal gaps for piracy. Spain, however, is going the opposite direction from the rest of Europe, as highlighted by moves against ISP immunity in France and Britain, he said. Entertainment Software Association President Mike Gallagher said his industry had a “record year” in 2008 but Canada has “a long way to go” and game companies face a “desperate situation in Spain” because of P2P piracy. The software industry has trouble getting sympathy even from fellow rights holders, said BSA President Robert Holleyman. A popular Norwegian film maker who railed against film piracy at a European Commission conference told Holleyman that, until then, he hadn’t considered the unlicensed use of software to be infringement, Holleyman said.