Canadian Recording Industry Association

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The Canadian Recording Industry Association is a non-profit trade organization that was founded in 1964 to represent the interests of Canadian companies that create, manufacture and market sound recordings. The organization is based in Toronto.

On February 16, 2004, the CRIA requested a judge force five major Canadian internet service providers, Shaw Communications Inc., TELUS Corp., Rogers Cable, Bell Canada's Sympatico service and Quebec's Videotron, to hand over the names of 29 people accused of illegal filesharing. Only Videotron supplied the information.

On March 31, 2004, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein of the Federal Court of Canada ruled that making music available for download over the Internet was not equivalent to distribution and was thus noninfringing. The Justice compared the file trading activities to having a photocopier in a library room full of copyrighted material and wrote that there was no evidence of unauthorised distribution presented.

The Copyright Board of Canada earlier that year had included downloading music in the list of "private copying" activities for which tariffs on blank media applied. (Private copying is the act of copying music for personal use from a noninfringing source, and is itself noninfringing.) That made it extremely unlikely that downloaders could be successfully prosecuted, leaving only the possibility of acting against uploaders, those supplying the works to others on the networks.

On April 14, 2006, six record companies left the CRIA after a dispute over new artists and radio content. The six companies that left are: Anthem Records, Aquarius Records, Linus Entertainment, Nettwerk Records, The Children's Group, and True North Records.[1]

CRIA is governed by a board of directors who are elected annually by CRIA members. To be eligible for election a candidate for the board must be among the chief executive officers of member companies of the organization. Graham Henderson is the current president of the CRIA.

In Canada,