In the continuing battle for the hearts and minds of music lovers
everywhere, the Canadian Recording Industring
Association (CRIA) releases a survey today done by Toronto-based firm
Pollara Inc. that concludes that 90 per cent of Canadian believe recording
artists and songwriters have a right to copyright protection.
These and other surveys are likely to become increasingly frequent over the
next several months as CRIA ratchets up a public relations and lobbying
campaign to convince lawmakers in Canada to change copyright laws so that
there would not be the kind of ambiguity and doubt which led a
Federal Court of Canada judge earlier this year to declare that peer-to-peer
file trading services like KaZaa were not illegal and sharing music
files through these networks was not necessarily illegal under Canadian law.
CRIA is appealing that decision but is also pressing hard to make sure that
politicans get the idea that they have to do something and do something toot
sweet.
Prime Minister Paul Martin is
receptive to CRIA's message and has said the government will act. It's
not clear, though, with an election looming if this issue at the top of the
government's agenda.
Meanwhile, the Pollara survey for CRIA — 1,350 Canadians were surveyed
between April 12 and 19 — suggests that just about everyone in Canada has
heard about this ruling. The survey said 70 per cent were aware of the
decision but that 63 per cent apparently disagree with the judge and say
that the law is indeed being broken when Internet users share music over the
P2P services.
Pollara says its survey is accurate to within 2.6 percentage points 19 times
out of 20.