Here’s the irony of the thing: Our copyright regime, in Canada, is rooted in Crown monopoly in the 16th century – a monopoly created by charter to ease the Crown’s ability to censor published materials and prevent sedition. Two things have happened since then: The Statute of Anne gave certain rights to authors, and parliament attained the power to govern.
In other words, people got governing rights from the monarchy, and authors got rights over the use of their own work.
The ironic part is that parliaments in the Commonwealth are bound by various charters and bills of rights that restrict governments’ rights to hamper freedom of expression. Since copyright has its roots in a Crown grant (at least in the Commonwealth), and the Crown no longer has the right to restrict the freedom of expression, the originally censorial regime has given us a (potentially) freer form of intellectual property.
By contrast, an that irony happens in reverse occurs south of the 49th: the intellectual property regime was born out of constitutional decree. Article 1, Paragraph 8, Clause 8 grants limited monopoly in creative works and industrial designs to promote the “progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Free enterprise and innovation were the goals of this pronouncement, and Thomas Jefferson himself believed firmly in the (relatively) free propagation of ideas (He wrote the U.S. Patent Act). But free enterprise also prevents government interference in the actions of a business, and in recent years, intellectual property law has become a tool wielded bluntly and ferociously by businesses who seek to protect their ownership of the unownable by any means necessary.
In Canada, where all laws are sealed with a kiss by the Queen or her representative, the Governor General, at least two copyright reform bills have been sidelined by public uproar, counting this latest. In the United States, where all laws are made by the People, for the People, with the People, etc., the people who actually sign them have been bought and sold by the RIAA, the MPAA, and other organizations run by artificial People (i.e. corporations). They created absolute freedoms for people, both natural and artificial, and those absolute freedoms include the freedom to restrict freedom.
The United States’ First Amendment, so beloved that it is stitched into the Flag like those security fibres in your cheques, applies to the relationship between citizens and their taxing representatives, but the Freedom of Expression does not apply to the relationships between employees, consumers, and corporations. It doesn’t here either, but corporations don’t, in the end, make the Canadian copyright rules – the Crown does.
Does that make us a bunch of socialist “red” business-hating Queen-toadies? Of course not. But rather than releasing the lightning-stoked monsters of incorporation and absolute freedom, we keep our Creature on a tight leash, remembering who created whom. We created artificial people (corporations) and we created our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and we’ve made sure we can reign them both in.
So how does that brief history lesson bring us to Minister of Information Control, Jim “I pledge allegiance to the Flag” Prentice, and the shelved, or should I call it merely “adjourned”, Copyright Reform Bill?
I don’t know. It shouldn’t.
There had been, until the great Facebook & Calgary uprising of a week ago, no public involvement in the drafting and process of the bill, except through the official agencies of the industries seeking to increase their propertization of informational assets – agencies such as the RIAA (and in case you weren’t sure, that second “A” stands for “America”). I could understand if SOCAN were behind the whole thing, not that I would support the bill any more than my current vociferous objection, but the fact that the RIAA is having any influence at all on Canadian legislation is abhorrent. We are letting our sovereign right to craft and draft our own policy be threatened, not only by a foreign corporate entity, but by one with a history of litigiousness founded on spurious claims. (To be fair, Prof. Michael Geist has turned demonstrating the spuriousness of SOCAN’s own claims into something of a delightful spectator sport; we aren’t exactly immune to tabloid-esque bogus statistics here either.)
The big question of the day, in two parts:
Why does this history and the recent U.S. influence matter?
Why does Canada matter now, and why might we matter even more if we take an examined approach?
Tune in next week or sooner for something vaguely resembling answers to these questions. Or comment, and supply your own!
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interesting site.