Change safe harbour exemptions in Copyright Act, industry committee says

The House industry committee is asking the Heritage committee to study whether or not they can compel online service providers like Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Facebook Inc. to provide some level of remuneration to the content producers whose work is hosted on their platforms. Echoing recommendations made last month by the Heritage Committee, the industry committee is also asking the federal government to examine what ways “safe harbour” exemptions from copyright law for these same online service providers can be made “conditional to measures taken against copyright infringement on their platforms.” The committee is also asking the government, in its own review of the Telecommunications Act, to incorporate the principle of net neutrality into its understanding of copyright law and to “consider evaluating tools to provide injunctive relief for deliberate online copyright infringement on their platforms.” The committee has taken a slightly different tack than the heritage committee did on the issue of “safe harbour” exemptions, after that committee called for the ending of those exemptions for internet service providers altogether in its report last month. While stopping short of calling for the ending of safe harbour exemption, the industry committee did seem to send something of a warning to online service providers like YouTube. “The Committee emphasizes that no entity is entitled to safe harbour exceptions–there is no ‘right’ to safe harbour in Canadian copyright law,” the report reads. Online service providers, the report adds, “would be wise to review their practices and the structure of their platforms to ensure that they reflect the full extent of applicable law, including the rules governing both copyright infringement and its exceptions.” The committee has also recommended the government maintain the definition of “sound recording” in the Copyright Act as it exists, rejecting calls from organizations representing musicians and performers of soundtracks to include those pieces of music in the act, though the committee believes keeping the definition the same will work out better for musicians in the long run. Changing the definition of “sound recording” would have allowed these performers to make royalty revenues from the broadcasts, theatre showings, and streaming of films or shows in which their compositions were heard. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the Movie Theatre Association of Canada encouraged the committee to maintain the definition. The committee offered as its reasoning that performers “would receive little (if any) payment up front for the integration of a sound recording in a cinematographic work, but would instead be asked to perceive later royalties—provided the cinematographic work is profitable or even released.” The committee also recommended that the government maintain the notice-and-notice regime, under which ISPs have to forward notices of infringement, rather than move to a notice-and-takedown system. The latter system is more prevalent in the United States and the European Union. In April of 2018, the Canadian Bar Association told the committee that the notice-and-notice system was insufficient to protect copyright. While advocating sticking to the notice-and-notice system, the committee also recommended that notices sent under the system be sent in a machine-readable format. In order to ensure that the notice-and-notice system can operate smoothly, the committee also recommended that the government maintain an up-to-date registry for IP numbers similar to the American Registry for Internet Numbers “WHOIS” service. The statutory damages rate -- $5,000 for multiple acts of non-commercial infringements, and $20,000 for commercial copyright infringement -- is out of date, the committee also found, and said it should be indexed to inflation. The committee also recommended that the government should consider extending the private copying levy to digital devices, after hearing evidence from the Canadian Private Copying Collective that artist revenues from the levy dropped from $38 million to $3 million between 2004 and 2016. The recommendations are among 36 others put forward by the committee in its statutory review of the Copyright Act, which involved some 52 meetings, between February 2018 and May 2019, and heard from 263 witnesses. The government has 120 days to respond to the recommendations. — With reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Change safe harbour exemptions in Copyright Act, industry committee says

Broadcast | June 4, 2019

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Change safe harbour exemptions in Copyright Act, industry committee says

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