Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice, US ambassador David Wilkins and the owners of major record labels and movie studios are not a sympathetic bunch — especially when they make proclamations like Prentice’s description of Bill C-61, the Harper government’s proposed copyright legislation, as “truly a win-win.”

In squealing for copyright reform, they do have a point: can anyone honestly defend practices like distributing albums and movies on a large scale by BitTorrent as anything but an act of theft? But what makes C-61 truly a lose-lose scenario for both the consumer and the pro-copyright reform lobby, then, is the fact that its proposed solutions to the illegal copying issue have very little to do with the problem they purport to fix, and everything to do with protecting outdated models for entertainment companies to make you buy the same product twice.

The entertainment industry spends a lot of money on developing new products, most of which fail. In the last few decades, they realized that they could offset the cost of developing new products by convincing consumers to buy multiple copies of the relatively few successful properties they’ve developed — whether it’s upgrading your copy of The Dark Side of the Moon from vinyl to CD, or your battered Star Wars VHS tape to a DVD. In fact, back catalogue sales account for large chunks of corporate profits — in a New York Times story earlier this week, independent auditors revealed that EMI had in fact lost £750 million on new music in the last five years, and had padded reported profits with sales of back catalogue artists like The Beatles. It goes without saying that many people buying Beatles CDs may have already owned their music in another format — records, tapes, eight-tracks, wax cylinders....
But now that ripping CDs to a computer is as easy as, um… (actually, there aren’t many things that are easier than that), the fundamental question that C-61 ducks answering is whether a Beatles CD is a different product than a Beatles MP3 purchased legally from a download service; whether an episode of the Daily Show you watched on regular TV (and paid for by enduring the advertising that goes with it) is a different product than the same episode available on a DVD. The entertainment companies would have you believe that they are, even if you figure out how to transfer them from medium to medium yourself, and that you should have to pay for them twice despite the fact that they don’t have to do anything to allow it. We think that’s insane.

Unfortunately for Canadians, Bill C-61 guts its own relatively sane $500 cap on fines for illegally downloading movies or music by introducing possible $20,000 fines for picking the “digital locks” that these entertainment companies install to prevent you from ripping your CDs and DVDs, something that the companies would likely start doing as soon as the bill takes effect.

It’s a supremely cynical strategy — not only do Prentice et al. expect that the average consumer reading about C-61 in the paper won’t care about the provision because they’re not the programmer nerds cracking these digital locks, they also want to pressure people into eventually coming to see the process of buying a DVD as buying the plastic disc but renting the content. You want to watch that DVD on your iPod? Even though it costs the copyright-holders nothing, you’ll still need their permission. And for that, you’re going to have to pay.

These calculations have nothing to do with pirates counterfeiting music and movies, and everything to do with protecting a way of generating revenue that makes no sense in a digital era. We do need legislation to address piracy; we don’t need legislation to pad corporate bottom lines, and until we get a bill that does the former instead of the latter, Canadians need to keep sending the people behind the likes of C-61 back to the drawing board.