While SOPA/PIPA is all but dead here in the States, Canadian law professor Michael Geist notes that the entertainment industry is pushing the Canadian equivalent through Canada's legislative corridors. In a blog post, Geist notes that Canada's Bill C-11 contains all the obnoxious things that generated such heated protest here in the States, including website blocking, Internet termination for alleged repeat infringers, and an new powers opponents worry -- just as with SOPA -- are overly broad and could make life difficult for legitimate businesses. From an earlier Geist post:
According to the music industry document, Bill C-11's "enabler provision" should be expanded to include "services that are primarily operated to enable infringement or which induce infringement." Those demands are echoed by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, which called on the government to "amend the enabling provision to ensure that it applies to services that are "designed or operated" primarily to enable acts of infringement." Both groups also want statutory damages added to the enabler provision so that liability can run into the millions of dollars for a target website.
The result, of course, is that legitimate businesses are terrified they'll find themselves in the crosshairs of a trigger happy entertainment industry, their overly broad definition of what constitutes an "enabler" of piracy, and their personal police force (a growing list of easily lobbied governments). Also just like SOPA, critics wonder why the law is even necessary, given the government seems to have all the tools necessary to pursue Canadian websites like ISOHunt.read comment(s)