Although there are many groups involved in copyright lobbying, at the heart of the strategy are two organizations — the Canadian Recording Industry Association and the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association. CRIA’s board is made up the four major music labels plus its director, while the CMPDA’s board is comprised of representatives of the Hollywood movie studios. Those same studios and music labels provide support for the International Intellectual Property Association, which influences Canadian copyright policy by supporting U.S. government copyright lobby efforts.

In addition to their active individual lobbying (described here), CRIA and CMPDA have provided financial support for three associations newly active on copyright lobbying — the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s IP Council, and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce (there are other funders including pharmaceutical companies and law firms). Those groups have issued virtually identical reports and in turn supported seemingly independent sources such as the Conference Board of Canada and paid polling efforts through Environics.

via Michael Geist — Unravelling the Canadian Copyright Policy Laundering Strategy.

Regardless of where you fall on the copyright debate, this is an important article, and one I recommend reading for useful background on classic “rent-seeking” behaviour by entrenched interests. Any fabricated or overly biased information reduces the chance we will make positive decisions that benefit society as a whole — which, at least in the British/American/Canadian tradition of IP, is a main point of copyright.

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Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society.

via Michael Geist — Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt adds:

To understand the key points made by the paper, you need to understand the purpose of copyright — something that many people are confused about. It’s always been about creating incentives to create new works. Copyright maximalists and defenders of strengthening copyright laws always suggest that without copyright, there would be much less creative output, because there would be much less incentive to create. History has shown that to be false. If you look back at the age when all creative output had to be registered to be covered by copyright, studies showed that only a very small fraction of content creators even bothered, because copyright wasn’t the incentive. It’s only now, when copyright is automatic, that people seem to think that copyright is somehow necessary.

via Yet Another Study Shows That Weaker Copyright Benefits Everyone | Techdirt.

There are many who disagree, but the study appears to raise interesting issues regarding the benefit to society of copyright protections. As Mike Masnick writes above, copyright is about balancing benefits (incentives to create with the benefits of distribution). Thus, the United States Constitution, in granting to Congress the power to regulate patents and copyrights, says that the point is to

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

In other words, although we consider copyrights and patents to be property, it is property that functions differently than many conceptualize. It explicitly lasts “for limited times,” for example (although other forms of property also may be limited — law students learn early on that property is a “bundle of rights,” not some kind of absolute grant).

I am not convinced that eliminating copyright is the best approach, even if this study suggests that file sharing may actually benefit creators. Instead, I think perhaps a better balance of rights may be appropriate, and may even benefit creators (musicians, authors, etc.) over the current regime, which tends to benefit current owners of intellectual property (labels, publishers, etc.). But I remain open to exactly what that balance should look like, and studies like this help to provide evidence for which approaches might be better than others.

Michael Geist explains the current status of business method patents in Canada where, so far, they have been firmly rejected — unlike in the United States:

Most people think of patents in terms of legal protection for new technological inventions. There is another form of patent, however. A business method patent is one awarded for a special technique for doing business such as improvements to a company’s accounting or sales department.

Business method patents have proven very controversial in the United States, which has been home to dozens of lawsuits over their validity. By contrast, Canada has tried to craft a balance that neither embraces nor completely rejects them. That policy may be changing, however, as the Canadian Patent Appeal Board recently denied an appeal by Amazon.com over a “one-click” ordering system patent with strong language that challenged the notion that business method patents are patentable under Canadian law.

via Michael Geist — Panel Strikes Blow Against Business Method Patents in Canada.

Although recent rulings in the U.S. have cast doubts on business method patents here, it is interesting to see their fate in a neighbouring country with a related — but quite distinct — legal system.

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