The United States has made its list and presumably checked it twice, and Canada has not ended up on the “nice” column for our allegedly poor attitude towards intellectual property.
According to a Reuters story, Canada joined Russia and China for having the worst record of fighting the piracy of copyrighted goods. U.S. business software companies lost an estimated $511-million in sales last year in Canada because of piracy, up from $494-million in 2006, the International Intellectual Property Alliance said.
Even if these numbers weren’t a crock (is open source counted in the calculations? Doubt it), everybody knows what all the best pirates have been American. This includes everyone from Captain Jack Sparrow to Captain Hook (okay, has British lineage but was played by Dustin Hoffman in horrible Spielberg film). Canada a land of pirates? Yo-ho-ho, we don’t be thinking so.
