Your Bandwidth, Your Music! Their Lost Cause?

Expect your computer connection to slow down significantly tonight. The Kazaa, DirectConnect and WinMx users of the nation will be adding to their inventories, as music downloading cases were thrown out today by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Justice Konrad Van Finckenstein ruled today that the Canadian Recording Industry Association had not proven that there was any copyright infringement by 29 so-called music uploaders. Thus, the ISP’s of the nation are not required to provide the CRIA with the names of those it suspects of high volume music trading. Effectively stopping the CRIA's legal plans in their tracks.

The judgment today stunned industry observers, but reaffirmed the belief of those who never thought of file sharing as an illegal act. The ruling also reaffirmed the belief of the Copyright Board of Canada, which had already ruled that downloading music is not illegal. Many Canadians have felt that with the current federal tax on blank tapes and CD’s the copyright issue had been long taken care of.

The Justice equated the idea of peer to peer file sharing to a library having a photo copy machine in it’s building, stating: "I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service,"

It was the second setback in a week for the Recording industry; a study released yesterday by the Harvard Business School said that the existence of file sharing has had no impact on the sales of CD’s. That is not the message the Recording Industry has been putting out of late, in print ads, television and radio advertisements and commentaries the Recording Industry has blamed p2p file sharing for the near ruination of its industry. The study and today’s ruling suggest they need to look for other reasons, a point that many observers have been making for a few years now.

While the Recording Industry tries to figure out its next move, the Wild West mood will prevail on the net for the near future. The Music Industry already mocked for its attacks on senior citizens and pre teen girls for finding music on the net will now be forced to no doubt launch an appeal, or push the government to change the copyright legislation more to their liking.

Knowing how slowly change can come, that will be a lengthy process for the Recording industry. For now, with the threat of legal action gone in Canada the file sharing fanatics will be trading at a feverish pace. Those that may have stopped trading for a while waiting for the judgment to come down, will be returning with a vengeance. No doubt wanting to make up for lost time.

Canada could also see a mass migration of computer literate citizens, the Recording Industry in the USA is still taking American downloader’s to court. It will be interesting to see if Justice Van Finckenstein’s Judgment today impacts at all any of the American Justice system’s ideas on file sharing. Giving the legal system there, some pause for thought on whether the issue of music file trading is truly a legal problem. Expect the Canadian ruling today, to be cited frequently in the States in future court cases.


Back here in Canada, the only problem now may be in stock availability, the sales of hard drives and blank CD’s are about to skyrocket. Proving once again that one person’s bad news is another’s silver lining