The comedian Denis Leary once said he doesn't trust Canadians because late at night you can hear them sharpening their skates, getting ready to come down and steal our cheese.
But now the US is calling out a different threat from up north: Piracy. The Office of the US Trade Representative, in its annual Special 301 Report (PDF), bumped Canada up from the "Watch List" to the "Priority Watch List" for intellectual property rights enforcement. Mainly, the US is concerned with Canada's ability to protect IP, despite signing a commitment to do so back in 1997 and reaffirming its commitments over the last two years.
The office says Canada "has not delivered on these commitments by promptly and effectively implementing key copyright reforms."
Of course, Canada objects to this classification. Ars Technica reports that the country doesn't recognize the Special 301 Report, saying in 2007 that it lacks objective analysis. One foreign affairs official in the House of Commons said then that "the US industry likes to compare anyone they have a problem with, concerning their IPR regime, to China and the other big violators, but we're not on the same scale."
There's merit to that argument. As University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist points out, Canada's piracy percentage for business software -- the only metric available in the report -- is 32 percent. That's the lowest on the entire list, and the figure is between 34 percent and 54 percent lower than any other Priority Watch List country whose stats are listed.
I would think the US is putting more pressure on Canada because of shared borders, but Mexico isn't drawing the same level of criticism, and its piracy rates are much higher percentagewise. Total losses also appear higher in Mexico.
This report might be more palatable to other countries if the US looked at its own piracy issues or asked a third party to do the job. Maybe this is a simplistic view, but I'd think that laying the blame on dozens of other countries without even a little bit of self-criticism is bound to come off as arrogant. No wonder everyone hates us.
