On feigned helplessness

Michael Geist rightly notes that there's little reason to buy the argument that Canada's current laws don't provide adequate protection against file-sharing sites:

The claims in the isoHunt lawsuit must still be proven in court (as would any case using the new powers contemplated by Bill C-32). But past cases suggest Canadian law is hardly toothless. In 2008, the recording industry filed a lawsuit against QuebecTorrent, a Quebec-based BitTorrent site. Within months, the Superior Court of Quebec handed down a permanent injunction against the site and it discontinued operation. Soon after, the industry targeted other sites with cease-and-desist letters, relying on existing law to demand that they stop operating.

Foreign organizations have also successfully used Canadian copyright law to counter alleged online infringement. Last month, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN announced that it had quietly shut down dozens of BitTorrent sites by filing copyright violation complaints with the sites' hosting providers. While BREIN keeps the names of the sites secret, it notes that Canada is one of the countries where it brings legal action.

The reality is that all major countries are home to some BitTorrent sites, including Canada. The question is not whether Canadian law is equipped to deal with these sites — recent history and the latest lawsuit demonstrate that it is — but rather why the industry has opted for a strategy of damaging Canada's reputation by loudly claiming that it is unable to address online infringement using existing law while it quietly files court documents that suggest that the opposite is true.

But that reality shouldn't be used to understate the difference between the status quo and the Cons' plan under C-32 (bolstered by the attempt to paint Canada as lacking the enforcement mechanisms already in place). And indeed, the fact that copyright holders are complaining despite the existence of mechanisms to deal with peer-to-peer sites should offer a compelling signal that it's the peers themselves who are the targets of the Cons' legislation.