There’s an article over at TorrentFreak, and here’s the article text:
The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.
Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the Canadian police made clear that Demonoid’s users don’t have to worry about getting caught, at least not in Canada.
According to the Canadian police it is impossible to track down everyone who downloads music or movies off the Internet. The police simply does not have the time nor the resources to go after filesharers.
“Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,” Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police, said in an interview with Le Devoir. “It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.
St-Hilaire explained that they rather focus on crimes that actually hurt consumers such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances.
A wise decision, especially since we now know that filesharing has absolutely no impact on music sales. On the contrary, a recent study found that the more music people download on P2P-networks, the more CDs they buy.
Don’t get me wrong, this is great news. What’s disappointing is the fact that it comes as a surprise. Canadian copyright law does not prohibit making copies for personal use (I wish I had a citation handy, but I don’t). Thus there is not, and never has been, a problem with “downloading copyrighted material for personal use.” With Canadian copyright law, the problem comes in when you start uploading copyrighted material to other users (e.g. while running a torrent).
This is not a free ticket to pirate whatever copyrighted content you like. It is an admission that the “personal-use” pirates are not the big-fish here, its the organizations selling pirated material as if it were the real deal (just think about Kensington Market; ever seen a guy standing around with a blanket laid out on the ground with hundreds of “DVDs” for sale?). One step forward on a very long trek towards the business model of tomorrow.
