Every year, the US issues its "Special 301" watchlist to name and shame those countries that don't do enough to protect intellectual property rights. Once again, Canada is a member of the top bracket, the "Priority Watch List."

How can Canada possibly be in the same league as Russia, China, and Indonesia when it comes to piracy? It's largely because Canada has yet to ratify the 1996 WIPO Internet Treaties, which require DRM anticircumvention laws and other goodies.

"The United States urges Canada to enact legislation in the near term to update its copyright laws and address the challenge of Internet piracy," says the new 2010 Special 301 report (PDF). "Canada should fully implement the WIPO Internet Treaties, which Canada signed in 1997. Canada’s weak enforcement of intellectual property rights is also of concern, and the United States continues to encourage Canada to improve its IPR enforcement system to provide for deterrent sentences and stronger enforcement powers. In particular, border enforcement continues to be weak. The United States encourages Canada to provide its border officials with the authority to seize suspected infringing materials without the need for a court order."

According to the US Trade Representative, who puts these reports together, the world's worst offenders are China, Russia, Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Chile, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Venezuela. Rightsholders had asked that Mexico be included on the Priority Watch List, but a Mexican official showed up at a public Special 301 hearing earlier this year (read the transcript) and pled the country's case. His chief data point: ACTA.

"It is important to highlight that Mexico and Morocco are the only two countries, developing countries participating in these organizations and Mexico is the only Latin American Country," he said, pointing out that Mexico had even hosted one of the ACTA negotiating sessions in January 2010. Mexico was ultimately placed on the regular "Watch List" instead, meaning that the US sees piracy as a greater problem in Canada than in Mexico.

There were a few words of praise in the report. For instance, Sweden got a nod for "measures to improve its [intellectual property] regime within the past year. As a result of such efforts, many of the Bit Torrent tracker websites and DC-hubs (types of peer-to-peer protocols that allow users to either download files from websites containing links, or from a central hub with infringing material) that previously operated out of Sweden have now moved elsewhere. In their place, legal alternatives, such as Spotify, Film2Home, and Voddler have generated growing interest."

Several groups continue to complain about how the entire Special 301 process is handled. Speaking at the public forum earlier this year, CCIA attorney Matt Schruers said that "certain submissions in this process have suffered from a sort of mission creep growing from disputes about enforcement to disputes about what ideal, substantive technical intellectual policy would look like."