CRIA to appear in appeals court

CRIA to appear in appeals court
The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is set to appear before Federal Court of Appeal in Toronto hoping to overturn a ruling in April 2004 that shielded file sharers from legal attacks. It started in January 2004 when the CRIA tried to force ISPs to hand over personal information of file sharers. The ISPs decided to fight back and Federal Court Justice Konrad Von Finckenstein ruled that file sharing was akin to using a photocopier, citing the Canadian Copyright Act as support.

Graham Henderson, president of the CRIA says the recording industry faces millions of dollars in more lost sales if the appeal is unsuccessful. "It could cost millions and lead to more job losses if we aren't successful," Mr. Henderson said. "It would be awful." In many countries, the recording industry has launched a battle against file sharers by filing lawsuits against uploaders, which is exactly what the CRIA had planned.



Mr. Henderson claims that since the ruling in April 2004, more than 134 million songs have been downloaded in Canada illegally. Movie sales were flat in 2004 however but Henderson said that the industry's retail sales have dropped $465 million since they peaked in 1999. The recording industry will have a hard time overturning the ruling. "Their big challenge is that they have to convince the Court of Appeal that the decision was legally incorrect," Mark Hayes, an intellectual property lawyer with Ogilvy Renault said. "They need to get the court to confirm that Justice Von Finckenstein's musings on the law aren't binding."

If the CRIA fails to convince the Appeals Court to change the decision, it can fall back on the fact that the organisation spent months lobbying the federal government to make changes to the copyright act. It seems likely that the copyright act could be changed by the end of the year. The CRIA didn't really need to appeal the ruling but decided to because of the chance the minority Liberal government could be toppled, leaving copyright reform in limbo for months or even years.

Source:
Canada.com


Written by: James Delahunty @ 19 Apr 2005 17:59
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  • 9 comments
  • chthomson

    It is amazing that the music industry always uses 1999 sales results as measurement of their losses. Music sales in 2004 increased in Canada by $2.5 million dollars. An article by Michael Geist ( http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/geist/ ) shoots large holes in the Canadian Music industry claims of lost sales.
    There are different laws in Canada and some interesting copyright legal decisions recently that will force the CRIA to work really hard to change the courts ruling from March 2004.
    The real challenge for the music industry is how they plan to share the copyright monies without killing sales http://www.michaelgeist.ca/resc/html_bkup/april182005.html



    If at first you don't succeed ...........!

    19.4.2005 22:57 #1

  • Musky179

    Personall,I bought 75 plus cds in the past year.Maybe the CRIA should suggest how many we should buy before P2P sharing would be ok by them.
    If they happen to read these postings,I wouldn't have bought half as many if there were no P2P sites for the simple reason that I would never have even heard of the artists.

    20.4.2005 14:05 #2

  • m_towell

    Quote:Mr. Henderson claims that since the ruling in April 2004, more than 134 million songs have been downloaded in Canada illegallyI'm still wondering how they determine the number of illegal downloads. Or do they just pick a randomly large number and use that?

    20.4.2005 14:48 #3

  • Musky179

    Well my first guess would be ,that if they know how many were downloaded then they must know who downloaded them or they are monitoring the P2P sites themselves.

    20.4.2005 14:54 #4

  • pbyk

    i wonder if they count all the duds that get downloaded as well:)

    pbyk

    20.4.2005 15:50 #5

  • vudoo

    At least in Canada they are not falling so hard as the US for the CRIA (RIAA affiliate) claims of sales still falling because of p2p. In fact the results say that music sales are at an all time high. This proves that file sharing is not to blame for poor sales. And what about the legal pay p2p service called Bitmunk? www.bitmunk.com. the songs are $.15 and have more content than iTunes and from what I can see they are not copy protected but have a water mark. You can transfer them as much as you want and you can trade them on the Bitmunk network. Problem is many people won't get the service because of poor human relations between the record exects and the people who would buy the service. It took them this many years to get it right when they could have done it with Napster and charged $.15/Song back then. Now the word just needs to get out. Hmmm

    20.4.2005 22:04 #6

  • ellie0

    WHERE DOES THE FEAR END? Suing filesharers is ridulous. 1984ish. Possibly Graham Henderson and others should do a little more research as to what's being downloaded. Out of "134 million" songs being downloaded, I don't think the majority of them are from fledging new artists who might be selling their music otherwise! There might be a bit of a problem with the fact that few people are putting out good music anymore and people want the "old" good stuff. Just a thought. Besides that, if I have a good CD and want to share it with someone, I'll just burn it. How are they going to stop that. Same thing in my opinion. If the day comes when they can start forcing ISP's to start handing over personal information of file sharers, they're shooting themselves in the foot. And, if so, it better be a legal obligation to inform the sharers first!!! And "Movie sales were flat in 2004" etc. etc. If they're losing that much money I would think they should take a good hard look at why that is happening and realize they should be paying more attention to the quality of what is being produced than to the spin off. Another example of laying blame on anyone but themselves and not facing the real issue! I sincerely hope that this Liberal goverment IS toppled and it takes years go "reform" copyrights. Might give them time to open their eyes and join the real world. It's a dangerous period of time and should be very carefully watched. They're infringing on personal rights here and people are going to have to fight back. Or lose more of our fewer and fewer rights to personal expression.

    21.4.2005 02:06 #7

  • vudoo

    Well there are programs like replay Music that allow you to back your DRMed files (Or make streaming audio to Mp3). This allows you to burn CD's, save to an Mp3 player or anything else. DRM does not work and they know it yet they hope all of us on the Internet are plain stupid (Wishful thinking). You don't even need p2p. You can share your passcode to your legal music service with someone with Replay Music and save save save to your hard drive and no one is the wizer. Itunes can be done the same way and best of all the program automatically puts the artist and song title in the id tags. Now this is way better than p2p. And you can share the files using Skype and only your true friends have the files. Bingo no more RIAA crap. Becides out of all the suits few have actually been fined one cent. It is a scare tactic and I won't buy it. I've been using LimeWire Pro to share files and its way better than Kazaa ever thought to be. There are more and more users comming to LimeWire every day and the quality of old artists is growing such as Emerson Lake and Palmer, Bob Seger, Ted nugent. I don't like the American Idole pop Rock slop anyways so even if p2p were to die they won't get me to buy alot of the new swill out there.

    21.4.2005 09:48 #8

  • Musky179

    I agree 100% with vudoo and ellie O.I've checked most of the pay per song sites and most of the artists I'm interested in aren't even listed.(50s-70s rockabilly).As for the new music put out these days,well it seems the less clothes you wear and the more cursing you can get into the lyrics then you are a sure shot at getting a recording contract whether you can sing or not.Hence no hard earned dollars from my pocket until the music genre makes a 360 degree turn.

    21.4.2005 13:56 #9

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