Laura Murray is an Associate Professor in the English Department of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and creator of the website www.faircopyright.ca.
Samuel Trosow is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. He is jointly appointed in the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies.
Speculation is heating up that we may see the long awaited Copyright Bill as early as this week. The National Post and Michael Geist have written that the government may table the bill this Wednesday.
According to the Post, the bill will include “provisions to target users with a $500 fine for all illegal files transferred online” and “measures to make it illegal to unlock cellphones or copy music from protected CDs to iPods as well as making it illegal to copy "time shifted" shows onto personal video recorders if flagged by broadcasters.” According to Geist, the Bill will be very similar to the one drafted last December with only some modest amendments to “include a few user-oriented provisions such as time shifting.”
Now that the public and the media have become so interested in copyright policy, perhaps the government feels that tabling a bill will divert attention away from some of the other problems they have been facing. I can't imagine how tabling a measure that threatens typical Canadian consumers with lawsuits will help improve the profile of the government, but we'll just have to wait and see what's in the bill. It should be an interesting week.
I am an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario jointly appointed to the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS).
Before coming to Western, I was a law librarian at the Boalt Hall Law Library at the University of California at Berkeley and before that I was in private law practice in California. My doctoral work in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA focused on information policy issues.
