COPYRIGHT
The issue: Copyright protections are evolving in the digital age as countries ramp up efforts to combat piracy and online infringement. The need for new measures has come to the forefront amid a torrent of illegal downloads of online content from providers including Netflix and YouTube and the pirating of material for commercial and personal use. What others are doing: Protections are being updated in jurisdictions including the U.S. and especially the European Union, which is set to vote this spring in the European Parliament on an overhaul that would block copyright-protected material, including software, films, music and books, from being uploaded or electronically shared without permission from creators.
A provision of the proposed policy would effectively mandate that compa- nies including Facebook and Google develop and fund technology to automatically filter out infringed content on their sites and search engines on a mass scale.
In the U.S., meanwhile, momentum is building around proposals in Congress that could formalize and increase royalty payments for music creators whose work is played on digital services.
In many developing jurisdictions, the push to reform intellectual property protections has become part of a plan to boost economic competitiveness, with China, for example, proposing to make websites liable for promoting unlicensed works as part of a broader reform of property rights.
Australia, which was described by the country’s attorney general in 2014 as the “worst offender” for pirated content, has proposed laws that would make it far easier for copyright owners to achieve court orders that would force search engines and internet service providers to block or delete pirated content. What Canada is doing: Here, part of the response is contained in the Copyright Modernization Act, which requires that providers give notice to customers suspected of pirating content. It is
left to the injured party to sue, with awards capped at $5,000 for non-commercial infringement.
Provisions in Canada’s legislation also prohibit demands for payment in the infringement notices, as well as links to any other sites where payments can be made to content creators.
The notice provision has been criticized by groups including the International Intellectual Property Alliance of content creators who say it “fails to provide meaningful incentives for network service providers to co-operate with copyright owners to deal with copyright infringements that take place in the digital network environment.”
Another possible impediment to the notice provision stems from the new trade agreement among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico that limits internet platforms’ liability for users’ content, while the deal also stipulates that Canada eventually extend its copyright term. The liability provision could prevent Canada from adopting Europeanstyle digital copyright rules, experts note.