In the continuing battle for the hearts and minds of music lovers everywhere, the Canadian Recording Industring Association (CRIA) releases a survey today done by Toronto-based firm Pollara Inc. that concludes that 90 per cent of Canadian believe recording artists and songwriters have a right to copyright protection. These and other surveys are likely to become increasingly frequent over the next several months as CRIA ratchets up a public relations and lobbying campaign to convince lawmakers in Canada to change copyright laws so that there would not be the kind of ambiguity and doubt which led a Federal Court of Canada judge earlier this year to declare that peer-to-peer file trading services like KaZaa were not illegal and sharing music files through these networks was not necessarily illegal under Canadian law. CRIA is appealing that decision but is also pressing hard to make sure that politicans get the idea that they have to do something and do something toot sweet. Prime Minister Paul Martin is receptive to CRIA's message and has said the government will act. It's not clear, though, with an election looming if this issue at the top of the government's agenda. Meanwhile, the Pollara survey for CRIA -- 1,350 Canadians were surveyed between April 12 and 19 -- suggests that just about everyone in Canada has heard about this ruling. The survey said 70 per cent were aware of the decision but that 63 per cent apparently disagree with the judge and say that the law is indeed being broken when Internet users share music over the P2P services. Pollara says its survey is accurate to within 2.6 percentage points 19 times out of 20.