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The grouchy Oscar Leroy, the peace-loving Amaar Rashid and the crusading Dominic Da Vinci descended on Ottawa Tuesday to give parliamentarians their marching orders for the digital future.

Or at least the actors who played those popular characters on Canadian TV shows - Eric Peterson of Corner Gas, Zaib Shaikh of Little Mosque on the Prairie and Nicholas Campbell of Da Vinci's City Hall, respectively - were all there as their union campaigned to get key changes made to Canada's proposed copyright legislation.

Bill C-32, which has passed second reading and should go to a legislative committee for further study this month, is intended to update Canada's copyright laws, but ACTRA, which represents 21,000 English-language performers, says the bill needs fixing before it becomes law.

The bill would officially legalize many well-established consumer practices, such as recording TV programs or downloading a CD onto a digital player. But ACTRA and other creator groups complain they are not being compensated for these uses.

"If you don't believe copies have value, you have no digital future," ACTRA national president Ferne Downey said in an interview. "It will be a digital world, but you have to compensate the artists who make the content."

The artists want to see the levies currently applied to blank CDs and cassettes, which are intended to compensate musicians for private copying, extended to digital media. But the government has denounced this idea as an "iPod tax," siding with the recording industry, which argues the solution is simply tougher piracy laws.

ACTRA, leading a lobbying blitz for artists groups representing a million Canadian creators, including writers, actors and musicians working in both French and English, prefers the levy model to pay artists directly for the use of their work.

"It's not a tax that flows to government, it is a revenue stream that flows to artists," Downey said. "We think it is a small modification to include the digital players."

The creators are also concerned that some exemptions in the bill are too broad. They are opposed to provisions that would allow consumers to make video or musical "mash-ups," and are worried about the exemptions for educational purposes. They also want authorities to get tougher on bit-torrent sites that allow users to view pirated movies and to force Internet service providers to deal more harshly with customers who download without authorization.

The government is expected to name the all-party committee this week that will consider amendments to the bill. Representatives of Internet users, meanwhile, have also said the bill needs amending: They are outraged it would allows producers to install digital locks on content, which might trump the new rights consumers are acquiring.

The audio-visual industries, including music and video-game producers as well as movie distributors, are largely supportive of the bill, although they say it needs amendments to toughen its anti-piracy provisions. But music publishers are the exception: The publishers license songs and they believe ISPs need to be held accountable for unauthorized copying online.

"When music is pirated, the artists don't get paid, but the ISPs, search engines, advertisers, websites, device manufacturers and other businesses do," said Michael McCarty, president of olé, the largest Canadian company of its kind. "Not only will Bill C-32 fail to fix this, it will actually ensure that these companies never have to pay."

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