Canada Scolded For Being Soft On Piracy

The U.S. government delivered a slap to Canada on Monday by naming it to a "watch list" of 30 nations accused of being soft on piracy, citing "weak border measures" and other failures to stem the international flow of counterfeit goods. Then a global alliance of industry associations that represents companies like Microsoft and Apple said Canada got off lightly and should have been listed with 12 countries placed on the U.S. "priority" list of piracy culprits - alongside such perennial offenders as China and Russia - because "Canada continues to stand almost alone among developed countries" in the futility of its measures against copyright violations and the illegal videotaping of movies. "The IIPA and its members believe that Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia clearly merited elevation to the priority watch list, given the lack of concrete results made in those markets over the past year," the International Intellectual Property Alliance said in its response to the annual piracy report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Canada was slammed by the IIPA for "its failure to implement the obligations of the two World Intellectual Property Organization digital treaties, and weak enforcement in both hard goods and Internet piracy continues to cause great damage to legitimate right holders, both of Canadian and U.S. copyright products. Moreover, the illicit videotaping of motion pictures in Canada, largely orchestrated by well-organized criminal circuits, has reached a startlingly high level." http://www.canada.com:80/montrealgazette/story.html?id=54c20a05-2a1b-4274-8a2d-551dadd1ebbb&k=8126 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 9, 2007]

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