INSIDE
IP
Raising the Temperature in Canada
Ottawa law professor Michael Geist is leading the
opposition to the government’s proposed copyright reform.
—By Susan Hansen
Canada isn’t known for its
rabble-rousers, and copyright
reform is hardly a hot-but-ton social issue likely to get a
mild-mannered citizenry all
riled up.
So you’ve got to hand it to Canadian
law professor Michael Geist. From
his tenured perch at the University
of Ottawa, Geist has mobilized tens
of thousands of his fellow Canadians
behind a burgeoning citizens campaign. The goal: to block the Tory government’s plan to overhaul Canada’s
copyright laws.
In Geist’s view, the proposed bill is
far too skewed in favor of copyright
holders, and is simply bad policy, courtesy of the U.S. Among other things,
the bill would ban purchasers of movie
DVDs from making backup copies
and make it illegal to circumvent digital locks to copy content, with fines
of up to $20,000. “A lot of Canadians
feel a sense of betrayal,” says Geist,
who knocks the government of prime
minister Stephen Harper for caving
into American demands for a tough
new copyright regime. “Canada was a
high-profile target.”
Geist is getting to be quite a target
himself. One conservative member of
Canada’s parliament recently attacked
him as “a pro-user zealot.” Canada’s
Recording Industry Association has
accused him of waging “an ongoing
vendetta” against its members.
Geist, 39, brings impressive academic credentials and energy to
the fight. An expert in Internet and
e-commerce law, Geist got his early
legal training at Osgoode Hall Law
School in his hometown of Toronto,
then earned a master’s in law at Cambridge University in England and a
doctorate at Columbia University
School of Law in New York. He has
written and edited numerous scholarly
June, when the Harper government
actually introduced the bill—known as
Bill C-61—the number has more than
doubled, to include some 91,000 of
Geist’s fellow citizens (in the United
States, with a population nine times
bigger, that would be the equivalent of
more than 800,000 Americans) as well
as nearly two dozen local Fair Copyright for Canada chapters nationwide.
Geist himself has been a bit taken
aback by “the galvanizing effect,” as
he puts it, of his Facebook campaign.
“I’m a little surprised at how fast
it’s grown,” he says, though he notes
that 30 percent of Canadians are
Facebook members. Geist says that
he gets literally hundreds of e-mails a
day from people who want to know
more about the campaign and how
they can get involved. His top action
items, as spelled out on the Facebook
page, include asking concerned citizens to write, call, and meet with their
local members of Parliament. Supporters can also buy Fair Copyright for
Canada T-shirts and buttons. Proceeds
from those sales will be used to help
“Part of my role is to fund anti–C-61 rallies this fall.
To Geist, the level of public interest
educate the public, not is understandable, given the way copyright laws impact ordinary people’s
just my own students.” lives. “This legislation could have a real
chilling effect,” says Geist. Though the
proposed copyright law supposedly
protects a range of fair uses, he claims
that the fine print in the bill would
actually undercut user rights. Of particular concern, according to Geist, is
the so-called anticircumvention clause
in the bill, which would allow copyright holders to place digital locks on
content. Circumventing those locks
would be considered an act of infringement, says Geist, even if the intention
was simply “fair use”—for example
if someone just wanted to back up
a music CD —continued on page 56
JOE CIARDIELLO
works, including the textbook Internet
Law in Canada, and In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright
Law, published when he was 26. Today
he is a prolific poster on his own blog,
www.michaelgeist.ca. His column on
law and technology appears in Canadian newpapers, as well as on the Web
site of the BBC. An Internet-law news
alert he compiles arrives daily in thousands of industry e-mail inboxes.
Still, it’s Geist’s foray into Facebook,
the social networking Internet site, that
shows that he knows how to use the
tools of Internet 2.0 as effectively as
any politician. Late last fall, just as the
Harper government seemed poised to
introduce a long-discussed copyright
reform bill, Geist countered by setting
up a Facebook group to launch his
Fair Copyright for Canada campaign.
By May, more than 40,000 Canadians
had joined the Facebook group. Since
