Canada’s proposed copyright reform bill received criticism from the Canadian Recording industry this week in regards to the fine limits contained in the bill.
Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, has set statutory damages for commercial offenses between $500 and $20,000, and residential offenses from $100 to a maximum of $5000 for the total of all infringements that have taken place.
The head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), Graham Henderson, spoke out against the new bill, saying that it was essentially a $5000 license to steal.
"Once this bill is passed, you could go online and steal every movie that's ever made, every book, and every song, put them on your hard drive, admit liability, and write a $5,000 check. That would be the full extent of it -- and it would be the first rights holder who would get all the money. Nobody else would get a cent. It's close to saying that for people who want to steal stuff, there's a compulsory license of $5,000," Henderson said.
Henderson has hopes that a “tighter, cleaner” bill that is “more protective of musicians” will reach the House and Senate floors, but it is unclear what penalties he would approve for convicted infringers.
While I understand that $5000 is not much compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars some residents in the US have been receiving as fines, it also doesn’t seem right to me to bankrupt a household because a teenager decides to download some songs on a P2P network. As I’ve been saying all along, there has to be a better way to settle these conflicts.
