File-sharing ruling opens Pandora's box

Here's my story from today's Globe and Mail:

While at the University of Waterloo, Matt Goyer and his housemates didn't want to buy premium television channels such as The Movie Network.

But to make sure they didn't miss an episode of The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, both of which air in Canada on The Movie Network, Mr. Goyer and his friends would fire up a new kind of Internet-based file trading software application called BitTorrent and download episodes that had been digitized by other fans.

“You can get a ton of content. You name any TV show,” Mr. Goyer said yesterday from his office in Redmond, Wash., where he has started with Microsoft Corp. after finishing his studies at Waterloo this year.

Mr. Goyer and his friends scare companies that own the rights to television programs, films, software and books — content that can be digitized and distributed on the Internet with ease using freely available software.
In the wake of a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday involving the country's biggest record companies, some rights holders are worried that they have lost the ability to protect those rights.

“It would be unfortunate if people saw this decision and suddenly decided to use file-sharing to distribute copyrighted works. That's just not the case,” said Jacqueline Hushion, executive director of the Canadian Publishers Council … [Read the full story]

The Globe also publishes today a lengthy editorial on the issue of copyright form:

[The judge] ruled that posting thousands of songs on one's hard drive with the door open to downloaders worldwide does not amount to “authorizing” others to use them, any more than placing aphotocopier in a library does.

It's a bad analogy. Better to think of the uploader as a person who makes 300 photocopies of a book in the library and leaves them outside the door for anyone to pick up and take away. To our mind, the very posting of the files, accessible to all, clearly indicates an element of intent and encouragement. We hope a higher court will say so if the CRIA appeals the ruling . . . [Read the full editorial]

And finally, my colleague George Emerson jumps into the debate with an op-ed piece on the issue:

I hope our Federal Court judge's name [Konrad von Finckenstein] becomes a byword and a new rallying cry for our rights as citizens, consumers and taxpayers in the digital millennium. Maybe we'll have to shout, “Von, man, you rock!” every time we start to get back some of our privacy and property rights that are steadily being eroded by corporate greed and dumb legislation.

Mr. Justice von Finckenstein has, for the time being, slapped down the international entertainment industry's attempt to get what are, in effect, private corporate wiretaps on people who may or may not be sharing music files over the Internet. They already have them in the United States, thanks to current interpretations of a wrongheaded bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed in 1998. [Read all of George's piece]