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Canadian Government Subsidizes DRM
MikeOttawa writes "According to the Ministry of Canadian Heritage [Government of Canada] website, the Canadian Government has 'announced a total of $2,746,530 in funding for three organizations to develop online copyright management and licensing systems.'
Three companies are mentioned in the press release, Access Copyright, COPIBEC and RightsMarket Inc. Each are receiving close to $1,000,000 CDN to 'build invaluable databases that will facilitate the management of copyrights, improve copyright compliance, increase royalties to Canadian content creators, and promote the use of Canadian content throughout the world.' Does that scare everyone else as much as me. It makes me wonder why the Canadian Government is also increasing the subsidy [Slashdot.org] paid to content creators from the sale of digital media like CDs ..."
first post!
Oh My God! Sign me up for the Bitch About DRM committee. I need to be enraged. Where do I express my discontent?
"Scared?" What the fuck is your problem? There's a lot more to be 'scared' about than some fucking CDs you have to color on with a magic marker. Go stand in traffic for a while, then see if DRM is first and foremost on your mind.
If people are required to buy overpriced CDR's, then why is the Canadian government subsidising the makers of copyright protection systems? It's too damned expensive to make copies of CD's up there anyway. If you're discouraged already, why discourage them again with these senseless copyright protection systems?
I hope Canada will at least execute the copy-protection scheme cleaner than they have in the US.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Interesting how the country that looks to be close to decriminalizing/legalizing weed is becoming the bitch of copyright nazis.
With $2.7 Million, all a government program can do is print business cards...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Canada should perhaps worry about becoming the 51st state instead
:)
Do we have to take Quebec?
What I seem to not understand is how Canada which always seemed to a good bastion of personal liberty has suddenly gone willing servant of DRM?
Any ideas?
I mean that explain why this DRM fiasco is taking so much root in a pretty liberal country?
Sigs are dangerous coy things
I apologize for my government. We're still trying to be just like the US.. not realizing that it is not our place in the world. Canada is not the same country as you are, nor will we ever be.. no matter how much money we throw around or bad laws we pass.
(Disclaimer of my bias: I don't want us to become the US. Not because the US is inherently bad, but because the US has a lot of problems that we should learn from and avoid.)
Why is the government subsidizing DRM development?
It is some sort of public service? The general population needs public DRM technology so they can lock up their E-mail?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
It's nice to see someone excersizing their free speech. I wonder if you are paid to be a pole (read: establishment subsidized wanna be hacker whore whose function is to discredit online message boards), or perhaps you just found your special place naturally?
DRM is a nice buzzword, but this sounds more like electronic copyright management to me.
This doesn't frighten me at all. In the title: "Development of Online Copyright Management and Licensing Systems" the key word I read is 'Development'. And that is what has been missing with DRM from the beginning. I have always believed that a better answer to this problem is plain old-fashioned R&D -research and development. Yet the **AA have been very reluctant to do that. They prefer to do things the only way they have ever known, through aggressive lobbying and through the courts. That cannot be the answer, and I wish they would realize that already.
Their suggestions of DDos attacks and such, show how infantile their experience level is here. I can almost picture them at a meeting - "What can we do?", some 2-bit programmer yells out "we have this system where you can slow their bandwidth down so much that they won't be able to get music anymore". "Wow! Ok, that sounds good lets do it!".
Real R&D takes a ton of money and possibly years before coming to the table with something useable. Along the way there are many flops and failures, and tiny successes of which to grow on. **AA doesn't seem to understand this process. They just want to churn out the next pop artist and keep their baseline solid.
When I first heard of DRM, I thought finally, they are going to fight fire with fire. They will develop some slick way of tracking their material. Similar to how we fight viri with antivirus software. If software and lack of public understanding is the problem, then software and education of the public has got to be the answer. But I have yet to see one educational commercial on this, all I see is Rip/Burn from the computer side. And their software proposals are both laughable and frightening at best.
Of course the suggestion of DRM quickly got out of hand, turned into a major invasion of piracy and sleazy proposals to undermine the legitimate customer. Who expected the **AA to pull the same sleaze tactics on the customer that they pull on the artists they supposedly represent? I know so much more about them now, all negative, that I was completely clueless about before. Here in the US we have that millionaire that donated 1mill to a law school to try and fix the problem. That is R&D money. That the Canadian govt is doing this I think is a good thing. It is both a national and international problem. When a problem affects so many people, then the governments should fund the research. The **AA has pretty well proven that they would rather keep their lawyers employed. They only thing I see funky about this is they keep using the word "database" as if a database is the answer. I am not sure if a database is the answer. I think that is the key here. Nobody knows the answer. That is why the problem hasn't been fixed yet. There are things in our future that we haven't even imagined yet.
Access Copyright:
Funding under the Electronic Copyright Fund will allow Access Copyright to provide a variety of online transactional services to clear both photocopying and digital rights. Whereas the bulk of current activity is tied to blanket photocopy licensing, it is anticipated that within the next few years the balance of clearances will tend towards transactional single-use licensing. This type of licensing can only be adequately served by a sophisticated interactive management system. It is the licensing methodology that is required by the multimedia industry.
They're going to have to develop a system for processing single-transaction requests, rather than licenses for people to make as many hard copies as they want. The money is not to develop some evil "let's charge more than before and scare people to death scheme," it's to create a system so people can pay only for the licenses they need, and so they can do it as efficiently as possible. This is the only one that seems to have the potential to be scary, because it really seems like they're being paid to develop the licensing methodology, rather than just the interactive management system.
COPIBEC:
The Department of Canadian Heritage is providing this support under the Electronic Copyright Fund, enabling COPIBEC to continue to develop the on-line system for managing copyright clearance for the entire literary sector. Once it is completed, the system will offer all users a common portal for accessing Canadian works in conformance with the rights of authors and publishers. It will also make it possible to legally license rights on all Canadian and foreign works available in the database. In addition, it will include digitized dramatic works, which for the first time will become easily available to all users of the Internet.
Basically, they're going to provide a single site to do all your licensing stuff for literary works. As far as I can tell, they're not changing anything about the current regulations of copyright in Canada. They're simply trying to expand their services to include online options. They're also going to put plays online, so you don't have to snail mail at least one hard copy and get permission to copy it if you want to put on a play. Instead, you download it. You might even have the option of reading the play before you choose it, meaning that community theatres in outlying areas (much of Canada) will have more options for plays than just those that they're familiar with.
Rights Market:
Funding under the Electronic Copyright Fund will allow RightsMarket Inc. to build a streamlined copyright licensing portal, in Canada's two official languages, that will significantly simplify the process of licensing copyrighted works and remitting payment. Initially, the Rights Clearing House (RCH) will manage musical works only. However, the portal will be built on an industry-standard framework that will be capable of handling all types of artistic, dramatic, literary and musical works in both single and multi-media forms. With the support of copyright collectives, RCH is uniquely positioned to deliver an optimal service, harnessing the power of the Internet for the simple and efficient clearing of usage rights. This service will improve copyright compliance, increase royalties to Canadian content creators, and promote the use of Canadian content throughout the world.
These guys are setting up a bilingual web site to do the same kind of thing as the other two. They want to create simple and efficient clearing of usage rights on a bilingual web site. How is this scary?
Fundamentally, all this money is going to companies whose function is to collect licensing fees. Each company represents a fairly large group of artists. The government is putting money into these companies so they can set up (bilingual!) web sites to simplify the process of getting permissions. They're not enforcing anything. All they're doing is making it easier for people who are already paying for licenses to keep doing it.
Independent musicians and registration-free net radio at EmergentSound
... it's as good as the gun registration database!!!!!
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
haven't you heard of government accounting?
...which is spread through contact with fecal matter and this is how the government responds? By subsidizing DRM?
MOD GOVERNMENT DOWN!!! -1, Stupid
This isn't a big deal. Canada's Liberal government is always handing out large sums of money to companies run by friends of minsters or friends of friends.
Why did we elect them again?