Canada's looking at new copyright laws

Canada set to try again on new copyright law – washingtonpost.com.

Now, isn’t this interesting. Canadian lawmakers realize that the current copyright laws are — um — outdated, pre-internet, pre-P2P, pre-very-easy-download, and they’re looking to do something about their own law.

The US regularly updates its copyright laws, but the US, so far, has laws that have little to do with reality. Peer-to-peer (“P2P”) sites abound with content that clearly violates copyright law, and that content is downloaded by tens of thousands of people worldwide. How will the US keep up with this deluge of potential copyright infringement cases (there aren’t enough federal courts to hear these cases) unless we pass legislation that automatically compensates the copyright holder whenever a download is made. One way that this can be accomplished: advertising revenue for the copyright holder paid by the P2P site which enables the download. Another, better, way is for every P2P or .torrent site to charge a fee (one-time or membership, that doesn’t matter) for the downloads.

How about it, Congress?