Canadian Supreme Court defends internet innovation "despite any incidental effects on copyright owners." Just because p2p like Gnutella (which is mentioned in the ruling) has made collecting royalties harder doesn't mean the ISP's should have to pay.

"Don't shoot the messenger." In the unanimous ruling by the Canadian Supreme court Wednesday June 30 2004, ISP's don't have to pay the Society of Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) for music downloaded in Canada. Here's a catchy paragraph from the ruling:

Quote:

Parliament has decided that there is a public interest in encouraging intermediaries who make telecommunications possible to expand and improve their operations without the threat of copyright infringement. To impose copyright liability on intermediaries would obviously chill that expansion and development, as the history of caching demonstrates. In the early years of the Internet, as the Board found, its usefulness for the transmission of musical works was limited by "the relatively high bandwidth required to transmit audio files" (at p. 426). This technical limitation was addressed in part by using "caches". As the Board noted, at p. 433: "Caching reduces the cost for the delivery of data by allowing the use of lower bandwidth than would otherwise be necessary." The velocity of new technical developments in the computer industry, and the rapidly declining cost to the consumer, is legendary. Professor Takach has unearthed the startling statistic that if the automobile industry was able to achieve the same performance-price improvements as has the computer chip industry, a car today would cost under five dollars and would get 250,000 miles to the gallon of gasoline: see Takach, supra, p. 21. Section 2.4(1)(b) reflects Parliament's priority that this entrepreneurial push is to continue despite any incidental effects on copyright owners.

from the site "prepared and published by LexUM in partnership with Supreme Court of Canada."

Happy Canada Day!

[et voilà--the Québec judge The Honourable Mr. Justice Louis LeBel, who provided many of the reasons, also emphasized the importance of home-users' privacy in paragraph 153. Yay! I was also glad too to see that Québec voters kicked out the Minister who "wanted to make changes to our copy right law"]