The IIPA's Wide Wide World of Copyright Crooks

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) last month released its always-bleak annual assessment of copyright enforcement throughout the world. The IIPA, a coalition of trade associations that lobbies on behalf of the music, film, software and publishing industries, declared in no uncertain terms that 2006 was a bad year.

IIPA looked at 60 countries and determined that 45 of them are playing dirty. The baddies include basically every major economy in the world. China and Russia, in particular, get the business from the IIPA, which calculates that those two nations each ripped off copyrighted works to the tune of over $2 billion in 2006. The IIPA recommended that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative keep China and Russia on the government's priority watch list, along with usual suspects India, Mexico and Ukraine.

But -- surprise, surprise -- IIPA also wants Canada added to the list of the most egregious violators. That's right. Canada. According to the IIPA, Canada was responsible for $551 million in lost revenue in 2006, all of it in the business software sector (numbers from other industries were not available). That makes Canada the fourth-worst offender. See the chart here.

Here are the IIPA's stern words for our Labatt's-loving neighbors to the north:

"Almost alone among developed economies in the OECD, Canada has taken no steps toward modernizing its copyright law to meet the new global minimum standards of the WIPO Internet Treaties, which Canada signed a decade ago. Its enforcement record also falls far short of what should be expected of our neighbor and largest trading partner. Pirates have taken advantage of the gaps in Canadian law to make it a leading exporter, both of camcorded masters that feed audio-visual piracy worldwide, and of devices – illegal in most global markets besides Canada – that are intended to circumvent technological protection measures used by the publishers of entertainment software. Canada lacks effective border controls on pirated products, and most of its other enforcement efforts suffer from insufficient resources and a lack of deterrent impact. To underscore U.S. insistence that Canada take action to address the serious piracy problem it has allowed to develop just across our border, and that it bring its outmoded laws up to contemporary international standards, IIPA recommends that Canada be elevated to the Priority Watch List in 2007."

Could this mean a new Canuck-phobic South Park movie is in the works? Not if you read this fascinating critique of the IIPA report by BBC columnist Michael Geist, who says that when the IIPA sees so many enemies, it only demonstrates how "out-of-touch and isolated" U.S. copyright policy has become.

Geist accuses the IIPA of finding fault in everything it sees. Countries that try to implement laws in ways that don't mimic the restrictive the 1997 Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S. are taken to task. Countries such as Israel that try to adopt laws similar to those in the U.S. wind up on the high priority list. Countries that grant copyright exceptions to students and universities are blasted. So are countries that use compulsory copyright licensing schemes, which, Geist points out, are common in the U.S.

Can't we just throw everyone in jail?

Photo: Kevin Jaako