Audio Video News

Canada's parliament is planning a wide-ranging overhaul of the nation's copyright law. And there's plenty of good news here. The proposed legislation would straightforwardly legalize many practices that consumers take for granted but that have ambiguous legal status in the U.S. However, some are critical of the fact that it also grants protected status to DRM.

The new law would legalize time shifting by DVRs and VCRs (already sanctioned in the U.S. by the Supreme Court's 1984 Betamax Decision). It would also make format shifting legal, so don't sweat it when you rip a CD north of the border. Backup copies would be legal too as long as you don't circumvent DRM in the process. Also OKed are mashups of noncommercial user-generated content and temporary copies in caches and RAM. There would be copyright exemptions for research, study, education, parody, or satire.

For copyright infringements not covered by the above, the legislation would eliminate the ISP from the legal equation, making illegal downloading a head-to-head conflict between the consumer and the rights holder. There would be sterner enforcement against P2P sites. And as mentioned above, it would be illegal to thwart DRM, just as it is under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That last provision is attracting some controversy, but on the whole, Canada's new approach is pretty pragmatic.

That's the proposed legislation. How it may change as it's considered by the parliament remains to be seen.

See Ars Technica.