Ah, there are times when it's nice to be Canadian.

"The Canadian Copyright Act is a lot different from U.S. law. Our act says it is perfectly legal to copy music for your own purposes. The language clearly says that "the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright."

It's telling that the only time the CRIA website uses the word "illegal" in the pages it devotes to piracy is in reference to U.S. industry losses, not Canadian ones. The word "theft" is not used at all.

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Lawsuits against Canadian downloaders are also likely to collapse if they were to be tested in court.

That's because in Canada, the industry is collecting a levy on recordable CDs. (It now wants to extend this to MP3 players, flash memory and blank DVDs. Ordinary PC hard drives could be next on their list, but the industry fears wrath of the giant computer hardware industry, and has held back on demanding a levy on hard drives).

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All this suggests that using the legal system as a weapon in a scare-tactic campaign to dissuade file-sharers � the industry has been quite honest about this � is not something that would be as easily accepted in Canada as it is in the United States, where litigation is part of daily life."

Check out the rest of the story here.

I was talking with someone the other day and they were saying how they've done studies to show the proper ratio of lawyers to 100000 people in a population to have an efficient society.

I think the proper ratio is something like 8 lawyers to every 100000 people. In Japan it's about 4:100K, which is why Japan rocks :)

In the US it's 40:100K. Guess which society is more litigious? I think we're right about the 8-10 mark up here.