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Whoa, Canada! - September 25, 2007

With Canada's long-delayed WIPO implementation legislation supposedly on tap for this fall, one of the government ministries involved in developing copyright policy has suddenly been rocked by scandal.

The Director General of Copyright Policy at Canadian Heritage, Patricia Neri, was abruptly removed from her position Monday amid rumors of a romantic link between Neri and Douglas Frith, head of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Assn., the studios' main lobbying arm in Ottawa.

The story was first reported by Canadian newspaper the Hill Times, which has not made the report available online. But it was picked up in a blog post by University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, a noted copyright scholar in Canada. Geist's report was subsequently picked up by The Inquirer in the U.K., which gave it a salacious spin on its web site.

A message left by Media Wonk at Frith's office was not immediately returned. Ditto for MPAA officials in the U.S.

A frequent critic of the studios, Geist said in his blog post that the reports should raise new questions about the quick passage of an anti-camcording bill in Canada. The bill, which was whisked through the Senate, was strongly supported by the U.S. studios, who blame camcording in Canadian theaters for a large portion of the pirated movies available on the Internet.

Neri testified about the bill before the Senate's Committee on Transport and Communications.

At the same hearing, Ontario senator Lorna Milne took note of the role of CMPDA, and in particular Frith, in drafting some of the legislation's language. From the transcript:

Senator Milne: Who wrote the bill? I understand that Minister Oda had a meeting in Ottawa about a year ago with my old friend Doug Frith — sitting back here — the President of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association, and that he provided the government with draft legislation. Is this bill pretty close to his draft legislation or did the government actually write it?

Perhaps more important than any belated impact on the camcorder law, however, which after all is already on the books, is the uproar's potential impact on Canada's WIPO law.

Canada is one of the few major territories in the world not to have implemented the WIPO Copyright Treaty (New Zealand is another). A bill was introduced in Parliament in 2005 but sank amid controversy over provisions regarding private copying levies, educational uses and technical protection measures (TPMs).

The government was expected to take another stab at it this year. The Office of Copyright Policy, however, obviously has a major role in drafting any government proposal. With Neri's departure, any momentum there might have been in that office toward a WIPO bill is probably gone.

As it was, copyright owners were already bracing for a bill that would likely have more wiggle room in it for circumventing TPMs than found in the U.S. DMCA, including the possibility that circumvention tools would be legal so long as they're not distributed "for commercial purposes."

Any lobbying the studios were planning to do in the run up to the bill's introduction, however, has obviously become more complicated.

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