Free for a Fee

The Canadian government has worried for some time about the possibility of having its creative industries squeezed into oblivion by competitive pressure from Hollywood and elsewhere. To support homegrown content, the government offers money to content creators and uses regulation to mandate that certain amounts of Canadian content end up on TV. But what happens when broadcasting moves onto the Internet?

That was the question confronting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which was facing pressure to set up a levy system on ISPs to help fund Canadian Internet audio and video content. The CRTC today decided not to adopt the levy proposal, though, and also voted not to regulate broadcast content on the Internet (read the complete report).

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Over the past decade, the US has largely taken a laissez-faire approach to antitrust and commercial competition. As a result, the center of gravity for legal action in this area has moved to Europe, where the EU’s Competition Commissioner has gone several rounds with Microsoft and, more recently, levied a hefty fine against Intel. Now, just as reports suggest that Google is urging the Competition Commission to take further actions against Microsoft, the EU’s copyright authorities will be launching a formal investigation into the implications of Google’s settlement with book authors and publishers.

Google’s book deal appears to be stirring up antitrust concerns on this side of the Atlantic, as the Obama administration, which promises a revived focus on antitrust action, is looking into whether the settlement will leave the search giant in a dominant position when it comes to digitized versions of dead-tree content. Google has been involved in a few deals that were investigated by EU competition regulators in the past but, so far, the book deal has escaped this scrutiny.

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What is going on in Canada? This week, a prestigious research group recalled a series of intellectual property reports that were highly favorable to copyright holders—and appear to have been plagiarized. And the Business Software Alliance admitted that its Canadian software piracy numbers were “estimates”—no surveying had been done in the country.

Irony alert

Both discoveries were made by law professor Michael Geist, a one-man IP wrecking ball. First up was a report from the Conference Board of Canada, a nonpartisan research group that was asked to produce a report on the digital economy. When the report in question came out, the press release trumpeted, “Canada seen as the file-swapping capital of the world.”

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The European Commission has moved to sue Sweden after the Nordic state failed to implement the EU’s Data Retention Directive in a timely fashion.

The Directive was passed back in 2006 and requires all EU member states to implement some form of data retention legislation, with terms of six month to two years. National laws were to be in place by March of this year, but Sweden still has yet to introduce a bill of its own.

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Warnings just aren’t good enough. That was the message delivered at a London conference today by a group of UK creative industries, which are demanding that ISPs start disconnecting users accused of repeated online copyright infringement. But the response from ISPs was clear: the creative industries can just shut their collective pie-hole until they do a better job of licensing legal content.

Hey, Digital Britain, start disconnecting people!

Today’s push for tougher “graduated response” penalties is politically timed to put pressure on the government’s soon-to-be-released Digital Britain report (read our coverage of the report’s interim conclusions). That report will shape government policy on issues like graduated response, and early drafts have so far been in keeping with the government’s current approach—Internet disconnection is off the table as a penalty.

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Many European countries have a “private copying” copyright exemption—but what does “private copying” mean? The answer depends on where you live, but two European Commissioners hope to change that over the next couple of years by harmonizing “private copying” law across Europe.

Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, joined forces with Meglena Kuneva, the EU Consumer Commissioner, to announce today the launch of a new website called (groan) eYouGuide. The site explains the various rights that European consumers have online and answers questions about copying, recording streaming audio, DRM, and Europe’s 7-day “cooling-off period” for purchases.

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The European Parliament late last week agreed to extend musical copyrights from their current 50-year term to 70 years. So all that early rock ‘n roll about to pass into the public domain? Don’t count on using it in your documentary for another two decades—and there’s nothing to say that the term won’t be extended again.

While the vote is a big victory for the music labels who can continue to market major artists like The Beatles (let’s face it, the obscure stuff from the 1950s isn’t selling in measurable quantities anymore, and it’s not playing on the radio), the movie industry looks set to cash in soon, too. In passing the term extension, Parliament also asked the European Commission “to launch an impact assessment of the situation in the European audiovisual sector by January 2010, with a view to deciding whether a similar copyright extension would benefit the audiovisual world.”

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