p2pnet.net News:- Big Music’s Brian Robertson says his CRIA ‘group’ is “very enthusiastic” about the appointment of Liza Frulla as Canada’s new minister of Canadian heritage because of her experience in the culture field.

Quoted in a Canadian Press report here, “Copyright revision is the primary issue,” says Robertson, who runs the Canadian Recording Industry Association. “It’s not going to be a stretch at all for her to continue to support that process.”

The stretching, however, is all Robertson’s.

We haven’t been able to find a reference to back Robertson’s claim that Frulla will “continue” to support copyright revisions. But it’s automatic for corporate music industry spokespersons to impart spin every time they open their mouths.

What he means is: he and his masters desperately hope Fulla will sit in the shadow cast by her predecessor Hélène Chalifour Scherrer who was ready to re-write Canada’s copyright laws to give the Big Four record labels a way to sue Canadians.

In the US and elsewhere, the labels routinely sue people for having the temerity to share music online. However, none of the cases have ever been resolved in open court because the plaintiffs, including senior citizens and children, can’t even begin to afford going up against the Big Five with their bottomless pockets and heavyweight legal teams.

Victims always settle out of court and things will undoubtedly be the same in Canada, if only the CRIA can gain a foothold for its masters.

Unfortunately for the labels, Robertson & Co aren’t getting very far. Federal Court Judge Konrad von Finckenstein recently dismissed their attempt to force Canadian ISPs to reveal client names.

The case is under appeal, but in the meanwhile the CRIA continues to try to convince people that file sharing is “devastating” the multi-billion-dollar music industry owned by the major record labels, none of which has a base in Canada.

More recently, in another major blow to the music industry, ISPs are “intermediaries” who aren’t bound by Canadian copyright legislation, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled.

The CRIA tried to describe this defeat as a “clarification,” saying it was a, “very good outcome for Canadian record companies” because it “clearly affirms … Canada’s Copyright Act”.

When the decision came down, Robertson tried to dress it up as a positive for Big Music. “The recent, widespread publicity on the Federal Court ruling seems to have heightened the awareness of the Canadian public to copyright issues,” he said.

In the meanwhile, anywhere between 8,000,000 and 9,500,000 people around the world are logged onto p2p file sharing networks at any given moment and at a conservative estimate, some one billion files are being swapped online between and among music lovers.

If music, movies and software were sold and distributed inexpensively online, there’d be very little physical product. There’d be a massive drop, certainly, but it wouldn’t be in sales. Rather, you’d see a significant reduction of overhead, distribution, manufacturing, and legal costs, illicit CD/ DVD operations would wither and there’d be a concomitant reduction in the pirate problem - the real one, not the fake one involving ordinary people who share online.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2004 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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