Sorry for the delay. Stop biting your nails, curl up in a comfortable chair with a hot cup of tea and read this final chapter of my essay.
So the Federal Court of Appeal made it clear that the area of downloading, hard drives and file sharing remains a very grey area. In future cases, which the CIRA will no doubt file in the coming months, these aspects of the Copyright Act will be tested. This foreboding was voiced in one of Sexton’s final comments: “[I] wish to make it clear that if this case proceeds further, it should be done on the basis that no findings to date on the issue of infringement have been made.” (Sexton, par.54) Read more…
Digital Music, Legal Studies
copyright, Digital Music, disintermediation, ecommerce, file sharing, retail, royalties
Part one of this essay ended with the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) was putting forth a motion to force ISPs to give up the names of P2P file-sharers.
On this motion, the CRIA provided an affidavit from Gary Millin, President of MediaSentry, a company that specializes in detecting the distribution of materials on P2P networks. The record labels supplied MediaSentry with the names of songs that were to be investigated. The company then searched for and downloaded the songs, matched the sources of the files to specific IP addresses and took screenshots of the users shared folders to show the volume of copyrighted material being made available for download. Read more…
Digital Music, Legal Studies, Media Technology
CRIA, DMCA, file sharing, Finckenstein, ISPs, PIPEDA, privacy, RIAA, WIPO, WPPT
Short answer: yes.
Well, it is more accurate to say that file-sharing is not illegal in Canada.
In 2005, I wrote and essay: “Copyright v. Privacy: A Review of the Legal War Between Record Labels and File Sharing from a Canadian Perspective”. I am going to review it here, in my blog and discuss what has happened since. Here is part one of the essay:
In February of 2004, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) filed a federal lawsuit against 29 alleged file sharers for copyright infringement and requested their identities from the five major Canadian Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This was the first suit brought by the record label trade group against individual peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharers whom the CRIA claim have caused the loss of millions of dollars and dozens of jobs in the Canadian music industry. Citing privacy concerns, the ISPs refused. The CRIA proceeded to file a motion in the federal court to order the ISPs to disclose their clients’ private information. Read more…
Digital Music, Legal Studies, Media Technology
CRIA, DMCA, file sharing, Finckenstein, ISPs, PIPEDA, privacy, RIAA, WIPO, WPPT
Wilfred Dolfsma is assistant professor of Innovation Management at the Rotterdam School of Management in The Netherlands. In his paper “How will the Music Industry Weather the Globalization Storm” (2000), Dolfsma examines the institution of copyright and how information and communication technology will impact its structure in the years following 2000.
In this “institutional economic analysis”, he explains the structure of the music industry, especially the functions of major record labels and music publishing companies, and their dependence on the current system of copyrights. He shows how the industry is directly related to both the national and international system of copyrights and that this system is based upon its historical capacity to influence governing bodies to change intellectual property law in its favour.
Dolfsma concludes that new communications technologies have made current copyright law obsolete and therefore should be “removed or appropriately changed, if and when possible”. The reliability of this conclusion is questionable because of the author’s subjective tone and self-contradiction with respect to financial gains for companies and artists. Although the conclusion is ineffective in illustrating the advantages of Internet transactions’ exception from copyright, it does succeed in proposing a plausible scenario for the future of intermediaries. Read more…
Digital Music, Media Technology, Social Media
copyright, Digital Music, disintermediation, ecommerce, file sharing, retail, royalties
