North going south.

The ink is not even dry on my book, which includes a passage pointing to Canada as an oasis of comparative copyright sanity, and already I'm forced to contemplate a revised second edition. Here's what I wrote on page 91:

Canadian copyright law is strikingly clear on the status of P2P downloads for personal use. They are legal. This relatively flat statement of the law is possible, in part, because Canadian copyright policies have focused on minimizing opportunities for conflict between consumers and owners of copyrighted material. Canada has adopted levies on most recordable media (examples include cassette tapes, CD-ROMs, and, for a time, MP3 players like the iPod) designed to compensate copyright holders for the multiple copies music fans could be expected to make. Canada's clarity on this point does not, however, extend to the status of uploading. And, as in the United States, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) pursued a lawsuit campaign demanding that five major ISPs turn over the names of 29 uploaders of music files. But CRIA's campaign stalled in May 2005 when a Canadian appeals court ruled that CRIA had not provided enough solid evidence of infringement to warrant the invasion of privacy attendant in the release of users' names.

Well, this BoingBoing post, entitled "Canada's About to Have a Copyright Disaster," suggests that Canada's measured and reasonable approach to personal use of copyrighted materials is by no means settled policy. Indeed, it appears that Canadian MPs are every bit as attentive as our own elected representatives when major media companies show up with their wish lists. While my book is, among other things, a long plea for a more measured approach to the copyright debate by all parties, there is also a part of me that wonders whether the better path is simply to let the media companies continue dictating laws so out of step with the public's behavior and preferences that we arrive at copyright Ragnarok sooner rather than later.