Hill Times Letter: Lobbyists don’t own the field of copyright

Letter to the Hill Times Editor published December 3, 2007

It was great to see copyright discussed in three different sections of the Nov. 26 issue of The Hill Times. Deborah Windsor of the Writers Union and John Degen of PWAC are right that creators should be understood as central to the debate. The problem is, many of the business associations, unions and collectives that claim to represent us creators sometimes promote policies that are a greater threat to us than any amount of copyright infringement.

The group of 12 incumbent copyright industry lobbyists on p. 14 continued their false claim that Canada needs “stronger” copyright law, which Howard Knopf refutes well on p. 13. These 12 lobbyists are largely looking for copyright rules which favour their historical business models over innovative new methods of production, distribution and funding. It is not copyright infringement that they are fighting against, but legitimate competition.

They talk about the decade-old WIPO treaties which Canada did not commit to ratifying. The 1996 WIPO treaties are based on flawed logic that harms the interests of most creators: that if new technology could be abused to infringe copyright, then private citizens should not be allowed to own and/or personally control these technologies. This would disallow creators to break free from the death-grip of the old industry associations, with this breaking free and exploring new methods of production, distribution and funding being the source of the greatest leaps in creativity and innovation of the last decade.

They claim the recent Industry Canada study has been authoritatively cast into doubt, which is not true. There has been rigorous debate on music industry studies with the clear conclusion being that the industry-funded studies that allege massive harm from P2P have no merit.

Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.