Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights
 

Yesterday’s Throne Speech clearly indicated that the Government plans on “strengthening laws governing intellectual property and copyright“. When we see the words strengthen and copyright in the same sentence we automatically think of legislation that sacrifices the rights of consumers, creators and researchers in favour of specific technologies and business models. After all, Canadians are well within the realms of sanity to react so sceptically given previous attempts at copyright reform, specifically Bill C-61 (The Canadian DMCA).

However, along comes the Minister of Industry himself indicating our dire assumptions may be presumptuous. Following the Throne Speech, Tony Clement appeared on CTV’s Powerplay and offered a glimmer of hope to balanced copyright reform sceptics. When asked if moving forward on copyright reform was a tradeoff for putting the “buy American” issue to bed Clement responded:

I’ve been pretty clear to the Americans and in my public statements that we are moving ahead with copyright reform. The key is, from the American perspective, they want us to be part of WIPO, which is an international treaty on protecting intellectual property. We don’t have a problem with that, but we’re going to do it in a made-in-Canada way. We’re not just going to take what the Americans are doing or what the Europeans are doing. We are going to fit it to the Canadian context and I think that is the right thing to do.

Given this refreshing dialogue, it appears that Tony Clement may actually fully understand the copyright file and the implications that modernizing the Copyright Act will have on Canadians. Hopefully Clement can parlé his encouraging views into legislation. It is going to be an uphill battle especially given the immense amount of lobbying that will be taking place in Ottawa over copyright. In fact it would appear that the industry lobbyists have already resorted to pulling out their big guns for this showdown:

Surprise memo of the month from my staff: “U2’s manager Paul McGuinness wrote you. Bono wants to talk to you about copyright”

A tweet from James Moore (the second half of the copyright reform file) this morning indicates that he received a request from U2’s manager to speak with Bono about copyright. Yes, the same Bono that wrote the infamous New York Times op-ed about saving the world by ratcheting up protection for intellectual property.

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