canadians — as bad as the chinese (almost)

Well, this story cer­tainly has got a lot of cov­er­age. I was quite sur­prised to read in Wired that quite of bit of IP is stolen in Canada. To wit:

But — sur­prise, sur­prise — IIPA also wants Canada added to the list of the most egre­gious viol­at­ors. That’s right. Canada. Accord­ing to the IIPA, Canada was respons­ible for $551 mil­lion in lost rev­enue in 2006, all of it in the busi­ness soft­ware sec­tor (num­bers from other indus­tries were not avail­able). That makes Canada the fourth-worst offender. See the chart here.

I was also at a very inter­est­ing speech that Gra­ham Hende­r­son of CRIA gave on the pro­lif­er­a­tion of coun­ter­feit goods in Canada. Again, though I knew of some coun­ter­feit­ing of goods going on here, I was a bit sur­prised at the num­bers that were presen­ted and also the types of coun­ter­feit­ing — everything from exten­sion cords to bat­ter­ies to pharmaceuticals.

Of course that’s one side of it. And like everything else there are always two side to a story. Michael Geist is quoted in the story as assert­ing that the IIPA is out of touch with the rest of the world by cri­ti­ciz­ing coun­tries who have less strin­gent meas­ures in place than US legis­la­tion, which he asserts to be the world’s toughest.

Its inter­est­ing to com­pare this with the MPAA’s pos­i­tion on pro­pos­als in the use on fair use, which I men­tioned a bit earlier. Per­haps best described like this:

Geist on IP infringe­ment issues in Canada: “Prob­lem? What problem?”

The MPAA on fair use issues in the US: “Prob­lem? What problem?”

And so it goes. <sigh>

related:

1. cana­dian export con­trols now apply to quantum cryptography
2. willy wonka’s ip policy
3. fusenet’s employment/entrepreneur program
4. new star­tup vc fund