Hill Times Letter: Canada has no obligation to ratify 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization treaties

Letter to the Hill Times Editor published May 24, 2010

Re: “Battle far from over on piracy” (The Hill Times, May 17, p. 9).

I have been critical of the statistics that Business Software Alliance representative Jesse Fender references in his letter. These statistics do not adequately differentiate copyright infringement from many legal reasons people are not buying from these copyright holders. For software these reasons include using Open Source Software, which the IDC consistently under-counts. When including entertainment (music, movies, entertainment software) the statistics inadequately account for competition for time and money with other sources of entertainment. These numbers don’t mean much, whether they are showing an increase or a decline as the error is massive.

Signing a treaty is to ratification as dating is to marriage. We have no obligation to ratify the 1996 WIPO treaties. That said, the treaties are flexible and do not require that we legalize or legally protect the most controversial and harmful proposals lobbyists for certain copyright holders have been asking for.

This subset of copyright holders wants Canada to legally protect non-owner locks applied to our devices. If a home builder disallowed the owner from holding the keys, and instead decided who and what was allowed to enter our homes after purchase, and to charge us anything they wanted for the service, there would be a legitimate outcry about this form of theft. We would never make it illegal for owners to remove non-owner locks, and apply their own locks where the owner retains the keys. The fact that certain businesses want to experiment with new business models should not matter, as we should never legalize or legally protect businesses built upon a form of theft.

The other controversial technical protection measure is the encoding of content such that it is only interoperable with “authorized” brands of technology. This is harmful to both creators and other Canadians as it pushes people towards non-owner locked devices. The fact that content is incompatible with the devices they own already drives people away from these purchases. This type of technical measure could easily cause revenue losses greater than infringement, and the statistical models used by the copyright holders behind the USTR’s watch list do not differentiate between these losses and infringement.

Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.
(The author is an internet consultant).