by SHANE SINNOTT

On May 29, the Conference Board (conferenceboard.ca), an Ottawa-based think tank supported by major Canadian businesses, conducted a conference called “Intellectual Property Rights: Innovation and Commercialization in Turbulent Times.” Ahead of this, they issued an attention-getting press release announcing “Canada Seen As the File-Swapping Capital of the World,” and that—you guessed it—“stronger intellectual property rights and enforcement are needed to protect new knowledge and shore up Canada’s poor innovation record.” All this comes from a horseshit inference, based on a study conducted in 2006 of 1,200 people, that Canadians download 1.3 billion illegal files per year. That is 20 times more then the number of supposed legal downloads and, apparently, allows the Conference Board to make up the claim that we are the “file-swapping capital” of the world.

The thing that really grates about this is the lie that stronger copyright laws are needed to “protect new knowledge”—as if making it harder and more expensive to access media will lead to increased innovation. The old saw is that Canada doesn’t “innovate”—i.e. invent Viagra—because there is less money to be made in doing so here, because it’s harder to “protect” your work. That might be true for pharmaceutical companies, but using that as an excuse to clamp down on pirated music, or watching Andy Samberg videos on non-NBC Web sites, is disingenuous at best. No one, not a fucking person, can look at the quality (i.e. the “innovation”) of Canadian music and say that it suffered because of our supposedly rampant file-sharing.

This whole business has never been about protecting artists. It is, of course, about money. And please, please, record companies—I wish you would say that. We could respect that. Show us the services you provide. Show us how we don’t want to live in a (record) label-less world of MySpace pages. That we do—we really do—want someone overseeing quality, that we want a music “industry.” That, in short, you deserve money because of the services you provide—not because you used to make a lot more in the past.