A first look at Canada’s “Born in the USA” Copyright bill.

(The full article didn’t make it to the Wayback Machine )

Having a chance for a quick read of Bill C-61, I can say that it will likely be decades before we fully understand how this bill will be interpreted by the courts. Contrary to what the Minister claimed, this bill reduces certainty in the marketplace, not increases it.

The largest portion of this bill is a Canadian DMCA, which is to say an implementation of the 2 1996 WIPO treaties and an ISP liability regime. The ISP liability regime is similar to the Liberal Bill C-60 from 2005 in that it codifies the current voluntary regime used by ISPs which is notice-and-notice.

The 2 1996 WIPO treaties are well understood to be a policy laundering of the 1995 National Information Infrastructure (NII) implementation bill, a Clinton/Gore era bill which was largely authored through consultations with the then successful copyright holders who saw new media and the Internet as a threat.