CRIA

The CRIA is the Canadian Recording Industry Association, responsable for over ninety percent of all music recordings made within Canada.

Like the RIAA, the CRIA has been attempting to curb copyright infringement over the internet though the downloading of digital music files. However, under current Canadian copyright law, downloading music is legal and therefore, they would likely have no grounds to sue people who download music.

Under Canadian copyright law, a person can have one copy of a peice of copyrighted matterial for purposes such as archiving or as a backup, but distributing the copy is an infringement on that copyright.

To that end, on February 16th 2004, the CRIA attempted to obtain the identification of twenty-nine individuals that they accused of copyright infringement over five ISP's based in Canada. The case was ajourned from court until March 12th 2004. In this case, the CRIA is having to compete with recently legislated privacy laws. A ruling on the case has not yet been made.

However, even if the CRIA were to obtain the identities of these individuals, it isn't necessarily indicative of a successful lawsuit since copyright laws in Canada differ from the controversial Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the United States.