Punishment, Private Style: Statutory Damages in Canadian Copyright Law

• Author: João Velloso & Mistrale Goudreau
• Pages: 268-285

268

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

Punishment, Private Style: Statutory

Damages in Canadian Copyright Law

  &  

 : Copyright infringement is a widespread contemporary be-

haviour of commercial enterprises and private individuals. To restrain such

infringements, legislators and courts have used punitive and statutory dam-

ages to sanction infringing activities and, in doing so, have incorporated the

punitive aspects of criminal law into the private sphere without the proced-

ural guarantees generally associated with criminal law. This chapter pro-

vides a detailed analysis of the courts’ decisions on statutory damages in the

Canadian copyright context. The authors argue that such a punitive path is

fundamentally based on utilitarian and behaviourist approaches. Based on

social sciences scholarship, the authors question the eectiveness of such

approaches to reduce copyright violations (deterrence). The authors also

situate this process of private style punishment in a more general trend of

asymmetric incorporation of criminal justice norms (Legomsky, 2007) and

discuss the systemic incoherencies created by such practices.

: La violation du droit d’auteur est un comportement contem-

porain très répandu chez les entreprises commerciales et les individus. An

de mettre n aux violations, les législateurs et les tribunaux ont recouru à

des dommages punitifs et préétablis pour sanctionner les actes de contre-

façon et, ce faisant, ont incorporé les aspects punitifs du droit criminel dans

la sphère privée sans les garanties procédurales généralement associées

au droit criminel. Ce chapitre procède à une analyse détaillée des décisions

ayant accordé des dommages préétablis dans le contexte du droit d’auteur

Punishment, Private Style • 269

canadien. Les auteurs soutiennent qu’une telle voie punitive se base fon-

damentalement sur des approches utilitaristes et comportementales. Se

basant sur les enseignements des sciences sociales, ils questionnent l’eca-

cité de telles approches pour freiner les violations du droit d’auteur (théorie

de la dissuasion). Les auteurs discutent de ce procédé, style de peine privée,

dans une tendance plus générale à l’incorporation asymétrique des normes

de justice criminelle (Legomsky, 2007) et montrent les incohérences systé-

miques créées par une telle pratique.

A. INTRODUCTION

In 1997, a statutory damages regime was introduced in the Copyright Act,1

as part of the second major phase of copyright reform in Canada.2 Under

this regime, plaintis in copyright cases have the ability to elect to receive

an award of statutory damages in lieu of actual damages and prots.3 The

copyright holder may make such election at any time before nal judgment.4

The government has clearly stated the underlying reasons for the adop-

tion of the regime:

A copyright owner who commences proceedings for infringement must

prove not only the infringement, but also the losses suered as a result.

However, it is often dicult, sometimes impossible, to prove such losses

because evidence as to the extent of infringement is usually dicult and/

or expensive to nd. Statutory damages alleviate this diculty by guar-

anteeing a minimum award of damages once infringement is established.

They also ease the evidentiary burden on the plainti in proceedings for

1 RSC 1985, c C-42 [Copyright Act].

2 Phase I took place in 1988 [An Act to Amend the Copyright Act and to Amend Other Acts in

Consequence Thereof, RSC 1985, c 10 (4th Supp)] and Phase II in 1997 [An Act to Amend the

Copyright Act, SC 1997, c 24 ] [An Act to Amend the Copyright Act (1997)]. After that, the

government announced that it was embarking on a permanent process of copyright re-

form and introduced a series of bills, some of which resulted in legislative modications,

while others died on the order paper after the dissolution of Parliament: see Industry

Canada, A Framework for Copyright Reform (Ottawa: Industry Canada, 2002), online:

Industry Canada www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/crp-prda.nsf/eng/rp01101.html. The last Bill C-11,

which modies the statutory damages regime, received royal assent on 29 June 2012 and

became the Copyright Modernization Act, SC 2012, c 12.

3 An Act to Amend the Copyright Act (1997), above note 2, introducing s 38.1.

4 Ibid.