{"id":88409,"date":"2009-12-18T08:44:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T13:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091217\/1233387410.shtml"},"modified":"2009-12-18T08:44:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T13:44:00","slug":"canada-also-getting-pushed-by-eu-on-ridiculous-copyright-policies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/88409","title":{"rendered":"Canada Also Getting Pushed By EU On Ridiculous Copyright Policies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you thought secrecy over ACTA was bad enough, apparently Canada and the EU are involved in equally secret <a href=\"http:\/\/www.michaelgeist.ca\/content\/view\/4627\/125\/\" >negotiations on a separate treaty<\/a> that has additional copyright implications that are just as bad, if not worse than what ACTA would require.  As with ACTA, the details have just leaked, and they&#8217;re pretty ridiculous.  From Michael Geist&#8217;s link above:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Copyright term extension.<\/span>&nbsp; The current term of copyright law in Canada is life of the author plus 50 years.&nbsp; This is consistent with the term requirements under the Berne Convention.&nbsp; The EU is demanding that Canada add an additional 20 years by making the term life plus 70 years.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">WIPO ratification.<\/span> The EU is demanding that Canada respect the rights and obligations under the WIPO Internet treaties.&nbsp; The EU only formally ratified those treaties this week.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Anti-circumvention provisions.<\/span> The EU is demanding that Canada implement anti-circumvention provisions that include a ban on the distribution of circumvention devices.&nbsp; There is no such requirement in the WIPO Internet treaties.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">ISP Liability provisions.&nbsp;<\/span> The EU is demanding statutory provisions on ISP liability where they act as mere conduits, cache content, or host content.&nbsp; ISPs would qualify for a statutory safe harbour in appropriate circumstances.&nbsp; There is no three-strikes and you&#8217;re out language (which presumably originates with the U.S.).<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Enforcement provisions.&nbsp;<\/span> The EU is demanding that Canada establish a host of new enforcement provisions including measures to preserve evidence, ordering alleged infringers to disclose information on a wide range of issue, mandate disclosure of banking information in commercial infringement cases, allow for injunctive relief, and destruction of goods.&nbsp; There is also a full section on new border measures requirements.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Resale rights.&nbsp;<\/span> The EU is demanding that Canada implement a new resale right that would provide artists with a royalty based on any resales of their works (subsequent to the first sale).<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Making available or distribution rights.<\/span>&nbsp; The EU is demanding that Canada implement a distribution or making available right to copyright owners.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Some of these are repeats from ACTA, but the others are pretty bad as well.  Copyright term extension is just pointless, and it&#8217;s amazing that anyone still thinks it makes sense.  The purpose of copyright is to create incentives to create.  You can&#8217;t retroactively do that.  It&#8217;s a farce.  Copyright term extension is effectively a welfare program for content creators.  If that&#8217;s what people want, then fine, but it should be discussed in those terms.  It has nothing to do with copyright.<\/p>\n<p>Resale rights are another huge problem.  We were just discussing how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techdirt.com\/articles\/20091201\/0046067145.shtml\">Australia<\/a> just added these.  They&#8217;re officially to &#8220;help&#8221; up-and-coming artists, but they do the opposite.  They basically give fewer reasons for buyers to purchase art from up-and-coming artists (knowing that selling them for profit will be that much more difficult) and really only help the well-established artists who can easily make more money by creating new art and selling it at much higher prices.  It, again, is a welfare system designed mainly to give more money to successful artists at the expense of up-and-coming artists.<\/p>\n<p>But the bigger issue here, as pointed out by Geist, is that between both of these treaty negotiations, you&#8217;re left wondering how come no one will let Canada create their own copyright laws?  These treaties aren&#8217;t about &#8220;harmonization&#8221; (the buzz word you hear), but about having global copyright law in a position where a single change in one country forces pretty much every other country to ratchet the levels up (and, yes, they do always go up).  <\/p>\n<p>Allowing countries to set their own copyright laws and policies is important.  Because we&#8217;ve never had an evidence based copyright, and because there&#8217;s growing evidence that draconian copyright laws can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techdirt.com\/articles\/20090617\/1138185267.shtml\">harm creative output<\/a>, it would seem like a <i>better<\/i> solution would be to let different countries experiment with different copyright laws (or none at all&#8230;) to see what happens and what works best.  Forcing all countries to align under identical copyright laws, entirely at the behest of a single industry, with provisions to regularly ratchet things up with no real review of the evidence seems immensely problematic.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091217\/1233387410.shtml\">Permalink<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091217\/1233387410.shtml#comments\">Comments<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/article.php?sid=20091217\/1233387410&#038;op=sharethis\">Email This Story<\/a><br \/>\n <br clear=\"both\" style=\"clear: both;\"\/><br \/>\n<br clear=\"both\" style=\"clear: both;\"\/><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/ads.pheedo.com\/click.phdo?s=78071f45572d6a89834eb81c5f3c2d46&#038;p=1\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" style=\"border: 0;\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/ads.pheedo.com\/img.phdo?s=78071f45572d6a89834eb81c5f3c2d46&#038;p=1\"\/><\/a><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" height=\"0\" width=\"0\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:none\" src=\"http:\/\/a.rfihub.com\/eus.gif?eui=2225\"\/><\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.techdirt.com\/~ff\/techdirt\/feed?a=eGEIQMCJBKI:syK9G-9_CSU:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/techdirt\/feed?i=eGEIQMCJBKI:syK9G-9_CSU:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.techdirt.com\/~ff\/techdirt\/feed?a=eGEIQMCJBKI:syK9G-9_CSU:c-S6u7MTCTE\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/techdirt\/feed?d=c-S6u7MTCTE\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/techdirt\/feed\/~4\/eGEIQMCJBKI\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you thought secrecy over ACTA was bad enough, apparently Canada and the EU are involved in equally secret negotiations on a separate treaty that has additional copyright implications that are just as bad, if not worse than what ACTA would require. As with ACTA, the details have just leaked, and they&#8217;re pretty ridiculous. From [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}