Canada Should Join USTR’s Priority Watch List, IIPA Says

IIPA said its estimates of piracy levels and trade losses don’t yet “fully take into account” Internet piracy. The group highlighted offshore “tracker sites,” which offer an index of files available for download elsewhere through BitTorrent or other platforms, as especially difficult to counter in the U.S. It said “enhanced international norms, more effective and deterrent enforcement of those norms, and greater global law enforcement cooperation” are crucial to combat online and mobile piracy. The Commerce Department also released its annual IP enforcement report Monday. (See separate report in this issue.)

The Canadian government issued reports recommending stronger enforcement against piracy and included copyright reform in its top legislative priorities in October, but nothing happened before Parliament recessed in December, IIPA said. Canada hasn’t even issued a legislative proposal to meet the Internet treaties’ minimum standards, it said. The country has become an “epicenter” for the export of devices that circumvent technological protection measures, such as mod chips for videogame consoles, IIPA said. Such devices must be outlawed and civil and criminal penalties applied for violations, it said.

ISPs should only get “liability limitations” for online infringement through “affirmative cooperation” with rightsholders, the group said. The Canadian government should implement a notice and takedown system, not the earlier proposed “notice and notice” system to forward copyright warnings to Internet users, IIPA said. It’s not clear that P2P services would be liable for users’ infringement in Canada under current law, so the government should make them explicitly liable, to ensure that litigation doesn’t start against end users as in the U.S., “the topic of much public discussion in Canada,” the group said. IIPA also wants Canada’s private copying exception narrowly defined to include only copies of noninfringing recordings. It appreciates the previous government’s 2005 proposal to add a “making available” right, similar to that asserted by the RIAA in the U.S., but said educational and library exceptions in that bill could undermine publishers.

Russia should remain on the highest watch list for the usual reasons, IIPA said. The country hasn’t fully implemented its 2006 IPR agreement with the U.S. and its enforcement is spotty, the group said, with piracy rates in some sectors over 70 percent. The government has said it shut down nearly half of 166 pirate Web sites, including AllofMP3.com, though a “nearly identical site,” apparently owned by the same company, went up soon thereafter, IIPA said. Not only commercial best-selling books but also academic and professional textbooks are widely available online in Russia without authorization, it said.

Few if any criminal cases have been filed against Russian site operators or those who “purportedly license such sites having no authorization to do so,” the group said -- likely a reference to the Russian Multimedia & Internet Society, claimed to be a rogue collection agency used by AllofMP3.com (WID Oct 18/06 p1). IIPA noted that the managing director of the Russian Phonographic Association was murdered just as various Russian collecting societies were seeking to be certified as authorized under a law that took effect last month. Though the Ministry of Interior has a special technological crimes section, Department K, no one there is specifically assigned to IP crime, IIPA said. Rightsholders want a sub-unit of Department K for that exclusive purpose, it said.

China is still setting “small administrative fines” for even large-scale piracy operations, and thus should remain on the highest watch list, IIPA said. Though the country has a reputation for bustling and illicit hard-piracy markets, “stemming Internet piracy in China has become the number one priority for most of the copyright industries,” the group said. China has high threshold requirements for prosecuting Internet infringement, making law enforcement agencies unwilling to act, it said. Rightsholders are also limited in their legal ability to investigate and seize servers from alleged infringers to preserve evidence, making it even more difficult to build a case, IIPA said. There are a wider bevy of options for Internet infringement in China than elsewhere, the group said. It sought legal action against Internet cafe owners, FTP sites, user-generated content sites, “search engines inducing infringement” -- Baidu was recently sued on those claims (WID Feb 5 p6) -- major P2P download and streaming sites and “major uploaders to those services.” The U.S. should pressure China to jettison its view that unauthorized software installed in commercial environments isn’t a crime, IIPA said.

China’s Internet regulations promulgated in 2006 have yet to be clarified as to their implementation, IIPA said. Recent guidelines didn’t allow the Chinese High Court to award appropriate damages and use a broader scope for injunctive relief in its affirmation of the Yahoo China deep- linking infringement decision, the group said. It also wants rules to clarify that ringtone-conversion services that use infringing files are banned, that rightsholders can serve infringement notices by e-mail, that ISPs must remove infringement content within 24 hours of notice to meet the “expeditious” requirement and that ISPs must restrict access to their systems or terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

Other countries IIPA wants placed on the Priority Watch List: Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Ukraine. New countries the group wants on the regular Watch List include Spain, Greece, Sweden -- home of The Pirate Bay operation -- Israel, Turkey, Nigeria and Kazakhstan.