American college students aren’t the only ones downloading music and movies. Canadians have been downloading 134 million songs per month since the Federal Court in Canada legalized peer-to-peer file sharing in March 2004. The decision in BMG v. Doe (see sidebar) marked a low point for copyright holders in general and the domestic recording industry in particular, which claims it lost more than $300 million to illegal downloading between 1999 and 2004. It’s no surprise then that the Canadian music industry is clamoring for the federal government to strengthen the Copyright Act. The government offered several proposals to bolster the Act in March 2005, which, if passed, would go into effect this summer.
“We have been lobbying the federal government to bring the Copyright Act into the modern era for the past 10 years,” says Richard Pfohl, general counsel to the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), which represents the producers, manufacturers and distributors of more than 95 percent of all records produced and sold in Canada.
