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See also: "Playing catch-up on copyright"
Loreena McKennitt is trying to figure out how she became the owner of a struggling small business. It was only slightly more than a decade ago that McKennitt, known throughout the world for her unique spin on Celtic music, was selling millions of albums through her own Quinlan Road label, based in Stratford, Ont. To support the increased demand for her material, McKennitt hired 15 staff that helped manage all areas of her business. She successfully licensed her material, including her album, Book of Secrets, to other labels and distributors, with that record selling more than three million copies worldwide on its own.
Calling from her office, McKennitt says her business these days is in disarray. Music sales have plummeted, and she’s cut 10 employees from her staff while at the same time tracking 48,000 free downloads of her entire catalogue of albums over a period of just more than a month.
“From the inside, this looks like a nuclear war,” she says. “The damage is nearly total, and what exists now is the skeleton of an industry.”
For McKennitt, it isn’t just major record labels run by companies like Universal and Warner that have been affected as free downloading of music became a pandemic over the past decade. She says job losses have been felt throughout the artistic community, with even highly skilled studio recording engineers who have worked with McKennitt in the past finding themselves out of work. At the same time, she says the Canadian government has dithered on an update to the country’s intellectual-property laws that might have presented a glimmer of hope.
“The food chain runs deep,” she says of the job losses. “This is like the end of the family farm for many people. You have to wonder how we got here.”
That’s the question many are asking as the country’s government once again promises to enact legislation designed to offer more support to those working in areas involving intellectual property, one of the significant areas of growth in the country’s labour market. In the throne speech given in March by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, the party pledged to “strengthen laws governing intellectual property and copyright,” in order to “encourage new ideas and protect the rights of Canadians.”
It isn’t that Canada hasn’t tried before to update its copyright legislation — it is just that the slow-moving machinery behind the country’s democratic process has hindered any progress. It has been 13 years since Canada signed on the World Intellectual Property Organization’s treaty on intellectual property, agreeing to eventually incorporate it into the country’s law. WIPO, one of the specialized agencies associated with the United Nations, was designed to address copyright concerns in the digital era. While dozens of other nations, from U.S. to Albania, signed the WIPO treaty and made it part of their domestic policies, Canada put its signature on it but didn’t move forward. Though the Copyright Act was amended several times starting in 1988 through to the mid-1990s, few changes were introduced in response to the cultural tsunami that came with the increased popularity of the Internet. Since then, the government has had several consultations with the public and industry about copyright, and has twice proposed amendments to the copyright law. Neither bill successfully made it into law, due to an election in the first instance and pressure for increased public consultation in the second case. As a majority of the rest of the world moved forward in enacting legislation designed to deal with the Internet, our efforts amounted to nothing.
As Canada toyed with what to do with its copyright law, growth in the Internet expanded rapidly (the country is currently fifth in broadband penetration, according to the Gartner Group), and with it came soaring online piracy rates. The music industry, perhaps the most vocal advocate of copyright reform over the past decade, was also the most affected by Internet piracy as it witnessed the total number of albums sold in Canada slide from a high of 58 million in 1998 to 35 million last year, a decline that led to hundreds of job cuts. Given lax law enforcement and powerful tools for digital copying and downloading, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Canadians admitted to being a nation of pirates, with research firm Environics finding that 31% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 owned up to taking music freely over the Internet in 2008, while one-quarter of Canadians said they purchased a counterfeit movie. The charge that Canada was a haven for thieves was bolstered by the fact that several of the largest file-sharing sites in the world, including isoHunt and Torrentz.com, have continuing operations in the country.
This has placed Canada under increasing international scrutiny. In May 2009, a special report from the U.S. Trade Representatives cited Canada on its “priority watch list” of those who don’t protect copyrighted materials, alongside knock-off specialists like China and Pakistan. The report noted Canada’s weak border was a “serious concern” for owners of intellectual property, adding the country’s inability to deal with online piracy was a primary consideration for adding it to the list. More recently, the issue of Canada’s perceived weak copyright law was raised as part of Canada’s free trade negotiations with the European Union.
And if international pressure isn’t enough, there’s plenty at stake on the domestic front. The latest round of the battle over copyright reform comes at a time when Canadian industry is becoming less reliant on traditional manufacturing and more focused on employment involving intellectual property. Over the five years starting in 2004, Canada lost approximately 540,000 manufacturing jobs, while copyright-related “culture” jobs totalled more than 1.1 million in 2007, according to a Conference Board of Canada report. Former Communications Minister Perrin Beatty, now chief executive of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, points to burgeoning areas of the economy, like the more than 400 companies involved in Waterloo, Ont.’s high-tech sector, or the 18,000 jobs relating to pharmaceutical research, as other examples of industries that need strong intellectual-property regulations in order to continue expanding.
“This is not something that is esoteric,” he says. “This is a major employer in Canada with the potential to grow even more. These are well-paid, sustainable, long-term jobs we are talking about.”
Beatty feels the Conservative government recognizes the need to finally reform the country’s copyright laws, a fact confirmed by Industry Canada, which has said amendments to the Copyright Act should hit Parliament this spring.
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