Copyright Competition: The Shifting Boundaries of Convergence Between U.S. and Canadian Copyright Regimes in the Digital Age

The great copyright debate between protecting creators and encouraging information-sharing has always been a contentious and likely unresolvable battle. However, with the crafting of new legislation designed to rein in unscrupulous sharing in the age of online sharing and piracy, the discussion grows ever more heated. The economies of Canada and the U.S. have always been intertwined, and in a copyright context, this has never been clearer. Since Canada began to appear on the U.S. “Special 301” piracy reports, the two nations have been locked into a system of promulgating ever-more restrictive copyright policy, the logical extreme of which may be to chill creative production entirely. This Note argues that the U.S. and Canada should examine each others’ less restrictive policies, such as Canadian statutory damages and notice-and-notice, and U.S. anti-circumvention, so that balanced copyright regimes may exist on either side of the border