Last week, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) filed an appeal against the ruling that file sharing had been ruled legal in Canada. The courts seen file sharing as copying for personal use like a photocopy machine being present in a library containing copyrighted material. However the CRIA have a different view saying that consumers should not be allowed to make files available on the internet for others to freely copy as this infringes the Canadian copyright law. The appeal notice suggested that the judge made mistakes in its ruling and the law.
One other problem is that the ISPs cannot hand over subscriber's information for suspect users as it would breach the Canadian privacy laws. Doing so would make them liable to prosecution. What the CRIA aim to do is follow the RIAA's successful approach (in the US) by using court orders to force ISP's to reveal the subscriber's information for suspect sources. An appeals date has yet to be set. Quakester2000 submitted the following news via our news submit :
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The decision flies in the face of US courts, which although they have resisted a shortcut method for identifying alleged illegal file sharers, have backed the idea that people swapping copyrighted works are breaking the law. The RIAA, America's equivalent of the CRIA, has now taken over 2,000 people to court for file swapping offences, in most cases settling out of court for a fine. European countries have just begun the same style of copyright actions against file sharers as the US under fresh copyright laws that have been inspired by the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act and pushed through by a US-dominated World Intellectual Property Organization. The Canadian court said that it couldn't force ISPs to reveal the identity of its clients since what they were doing wasn't against Canadian law, as it was seen as copying for personal use. The CRIA view is that Canada has copyright law, and that law shouldn't allow people to make copies of hundreds or thousands of copyrighted songs and to put them out on the Internet for copying and global distribution. Read the full article here. |
It looks like it will not be long before this loophole in the Canadian law becomes plugged. Even if this ruling fails, it will be just a short matter of time before new legislation becomes enforced to make file sharing of copyright works illegal .
Source: The Register
