For those who keep up with the latest advances in technology, the term “the cloud” is nothing new. For those who do not, “the cloud,” or “cloud computing,” refers to web-based software and online data storage. The growing trend in computing today seems to denote a shift away from hard-disk storage and software and toward this new, online framework.
Three of the major players in the field – Google, Amazon, and Apple – are harnessing the power of the cloud to offer web-based music players and storage services. On May 10, Google unveiled its new online music-storage service at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Amazon has already released its “Cloud Player,” and Apple is in the process of coming out with its own cloud-based music offering.
Though these services are not yet available in Canada – and likely won’t be for a while – the question arises as to whether they would present copyright issues here. Leaving out the obvious distribution-licensing issues, the current Canadian Copyright Act does not allow for format shifting (the transferring of media artifacts from one format to another).
The format most widely used to encode digital music is, without a doubt, the MP3. So if the music were to be uploaded in MP3 format, there would be no issue. However, not all music files are MP3s; WMA, AIFF, and FLAC are just some of the other file formats in which music is often encoded. If the music were to be uploaded in a non-MP3 format, the service provider – in this case, Google, Amazon, or Apple – would be forced to convert it into MP3 format in order to render it compatible with the player. This would ultimately mean that the service providers would have to acquire publishing licences in order to properly operate the service.
Such a consideration may appear to be minor, but it may prove to be a larger barrier to entry than one would think. Needless to say, obtaining a publishing licence would be more costly for service providers. And while the music purchased from the provider would be in MP3 format, the songs uploaded by users may not be. Therefore, the provider would have to swallow the cost as a necessary evil without seeing any profit from the transaction. After all, web-based music services would become much less attractive if consumers were unable to upload the music they had previously acquired.
The now defunct Bill C-32, Canada’s most recent attempt at modernizing our contextually archaic copyright laws, provided for a “consumer exception” that would allow format shifting for private use. It is unclear, however, if that provision would have included this type of activity.
The provision was originally conceived to allow consumers to transfer their media from one platform to another (i.e. from a CD to an iPod). In this case, it would be Google or Amazon executing the format shift. Furthermore, one of the requirements that the bill outlined was that the original file had to be a legally purchased version. That way, if the service provider were caught format shifting its clients’ illegally downloaded music, the provision would not apply and the service provider could feasibly be held liable for secondary infringement.
It is clear that technology is going the way of the cloud. It will become increasingly difficult for Canadian policy to ignore that fact. It is somewhat embarrassing that Canadian copyright laws have not been modified since 1997. That’s two years prior to the birth of Napster, an online trend that died a decade ago and has been replaced countless times. One thing is certain: Further neglect to the modernization of copyright in Canada will have the undesired effect of leaving us in the dust of technological progress – an outcome most Canadians are probably unwilling to accept.
0 comments:
Post a Comment