The heads of several Canadian content trade groups (including the CRIA, which represents the four major labels) recently sat down with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen for an hour of conversation about the copyright reform bill soon coming to Canada and what content owners want to see changed. Despite the poor recording quality, the bad questions, and the general "I'm just going to talk over you" approach of the content owners, the conversation is worth a listen to anyone (not just Canadians) who wants to understand where content owners are coming from. Or you could just let me sum it up for you in two words: they're coming from Frustration Junction.

Graham Henderson, the boss of CRIA, comes across as a man not out to screw the world (as CRIA is sometimes portrayed), but as a man about ready to tear out his own hair in frustration over the fact that the music industry is so consistently demonized by consumers even as those consumers take its core product without paying. A skilled talker, Henderson is the most interesting person at the table, and it's actually quite humanizing to listen as his polished façade cracks a bit. He points out that Canadian labels have not chosen to sue their fans, but then goes plaintive for a moment, saying, "We get absolutely zero credit for that."

One of his main points is that music industry is not simply sticking its head in the sand and dreaming about the coked-up glory days of yesteryear. The music business as a whole recognizes that change is coming; with the advent of digital music sales, a "singles market" may be emerging that could largely displace the focus on albums. Henderson points out that the music industry has seen this before, in the 1950s and 60s. The market was largely a singles market then until the Beatles made the album relevant. The music industry will adapt to changing conditions, but this is obviously made more difficult when it has competition in the form of file-swapping.

Should file-swapping continue at its present levels, Henderson argues that performers will essentially returned to the economic model of the 1800s, where the only way to make cash was to get up on a stage somewhere and perform. While that's certainly lucrative for some artists, Henderson doesn't believe that constant touring is sustainable for the industry as a whole.

He and the other members of the discussion (who represent independent recording labels and actors, among others) have some disagreements, but all want to see the 1996 WIPO intellectual property treaties at last incorporated into Canadian law. This is what led to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, but the content owners are sick of hearing Canada's upcoming copyright reform bill called the "Canadian DMCA" (as law professor Michael Geist and others have dubbed it), largely because the law hasn't even been introduced yet, and no one knows for sure what's in it. Instead, Henderson says, the bill should be considered on its merits, as should proposals from the content industries.

Fair enough. So what have the content industries put forward in the way of ideas about copyright reform? Henderson and others spoke approvingly about government-mandated ISP filtering in Europe and private-sector sponsored filtering in the US (from AT&T). They would love to see such filtering made part of Canadian law, and point out that "the roof hasn't fallen in on privacy" in Europe.

All agree that anticircumvention measures for DRM are important. This is part of the WIPO treaties, though it can be implemented in such a way that it only affects those who want to do something illegal with the content. Canada's privacy commissioner has just raised her own concerns about anticircumvention, pointing out that some DRM schemes can traffic in personal data; not allowing users to bypass or break such schemes could put privacy at risk.

The Creators' Copyright Coalition, which represents 16 trade groups for actors, writers, filmmakers, and songwriters, has just issued its own extensive proposal for copyright reform. It doesn't start well, complaining in the introduction about "the tendency to privilege users" and "the concept of ‘users' rights'."

The group wants to give artists total control over transferring their works to "to another medium," which appears targeted at CD ripping, among other things. Speaking specifically of digitization, the CCC says that it's "essential that rights holders preserve their exclusive right to authorize or forbid, and extract remuneration from, all forms of reproduction."

CCC wants Canada's current levy system for music expanded to cover "all categories of work covered by the Copyright Act," including books, films, and paintings. That means new tariffs for all sorts of devices, with the money designed to cover "private copying." This doesn't legalize file-swapping in any way.

Copyright law currently allows people to read a "reasonable extract" of a published work without infringing copyright; the CCC wants this right removed. Canada should also adopt a "notice and takedown" system for ISPs that would function much like the DMCA in the US. This has actually worked quite well, and has allowed ISPs to avoid playing the cop so long as they respond to appropriate requests from others.

Taken together, these sound a lot like the DMCA, so it's not clear why Henderson and the others are so offended by the comparison. But whatever the merits of these ideas, a newly-energized Canadian public is unlikely to let them all pass. Mandated ISP filtering, for instance, seems to have little chance of success. Michael Geist notes that "mandatory filtering sounds better suited to China rather than Canada and one would hope that Prentice and the Conservatives would know better than to jump on the mandated ISP filtering bandwagon as it would undoubtedly generate even greater opposition from virtually all stakeholders."

The fact that CRIA is still lobbying heavily for its proposals and that substantive new proposals are coming out of the CCC and other groups would seem to suggest that the issue is still one in need of debate, though Henderson claimed that the issue has been talked to death for years and that action—not words—are needed now.

Update: Several readers rightly thought it worth mentioning that CRIA did in fact file lawsuits against 29 file-swappers in 2004. The suits failed and have not been pursued since. In contrast, the RIAA has launched an estimated 20,000 suits against US file-swappers.