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Canada Immune From RIAA?
Nick McKay writes "Tech Central Station is carrying a story on how Canadians are legally allowed to copy music not only in the home environment, but also on P2P networks such as Kazaa."
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"Canada Immune From RIAA?"
Being that the last letter in RIAA stands for "America", I would hope that all nations outside of the US are immune..
Trolling is a art,
To quote Jay Currie (emphasis mine):
Audio recording media is defined as "Analog Audio Casette Tapes," "MiniDisc, CD-R Audio and CD-RW Audio" and "CD-R and CD-RW." [2] This does not include hard drives (I recall discussion of extending the levy to hard drives), so therefore your hard drive is not "audio recording media" and thus the Act does not legalize file sharing.
This being said, it would be harder to argue if you immediately burned the downloaded songs to an audio CD, promptly deleting the copy on your hard drive.
The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as "private copying"). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use.
Looks the same as fair use in the U.S.A. Moreover, the author of this article says that the DMCA is what makes file sharing illegal in the U.S.A. This isn't true, and probably hints at the level of understanding the author has of the situation. Unfortunately, people are going to start believing this. The author could be sued.
Does this guy know how many megabytes are on a typical CD-R? or on a new hard drive? Let's see, the tax on a new 120Gig drive would be, what, $1200?
So that means every time you buy a CD to backup your Word documents, or photos, or home movies etc you pay a $0.77 tax which ends up going to the music industry.
They give it with one hand and take it with the other.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
This media levy pisses me off to no end - I've bought 100's of CD-R's over the years and I've used exactly 3 for music - and that was just for music that I already owned.
I don't want free music, I want cheaper recordable media! I'm not sure about this $0.77 per CD though - I'm sure i've bought CD's for $0.50 before on spindles.
This levy is utter B.S. I mean why not compensate SOFTWARE publishers as well as musicians? I wonder what the ratio is of pirated music vs. pirated software - especially if you take the MSRP of software - i mean it takes a lot of music CD's to equal the cost of one copy of 3ds MAX or Photoshop.
Universal health care? Check.
9 00-1999.html ).
;).
Lax marijuana laws? Check.
Can marry another man if for some reason I was feeling saucey? Check.
and now freedom to share music?
Canada has always been very free, for example Canada (BC, Quebec) did away with prohibition years (1921 vs. 1933), with the rest of the provinces following soon after, before America ( http://www.sleeman.com/en/heritage/crafthistory-1
The problem with Americans saying that they are the freest country is that they tend to believe it even if it isnt necessarily so. Self denial and delusion prevents the problem being resolved; ask alcoholics anonymous and why the first step is admitting there is a problem
I would like to direct your attention to the Private Copying section of the Canadian Copyright act here.
Specifically, 80.2(c) -- Subsection (1) [the private copying exception] does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following : (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication;
In order for file sharing as we know it to be legal, you would have to make the argument that putting something up on Kazaa is NOT communicating to the public by telecommunications.
I'm not saying it can't be done (indeed, I don't belive any of this has ever actually been tested in court), but good fucking luck.
Something like dc++ with a private hub between friends would be a much less challenging scenario to argue, as the general public isn't involved.
Note that the intent of this law was that people would be able to share music (note that this ONLY applies to MUSICAL AUDIO RECORDINGS -- spoken word recordings, or even sound effect recordings (and certainly not video) aren't covered by this) with thier family and friends without it being illegal. Basically, they looked at the fact that most people would be considered criminals under the current laws, and decided that there's really no point in that, and used the situation as an excuse to find another way for the goverenment to get money out of people. But since you're Canadian, you're used to that by now.
Kazaa and such are not for that purpose -- they are intended to share music with the anonymous internet in exchange for getting music you want back from the anonymous interent. If you ever wind up in court, and try and defend yourself with this exception, the intent of the law is going to be taken into account by the judge.
This made me think of an interesting aspect of globalization and migration.
Governments are starting to realize that the future health of their nations depend on encouraging immigration (in the case of coountries with ageing populations) and discouraging emmigration (in the case of countries losing their citizens).
A large part of the USA's economic and political strength comes from its attractiveness to migrants, especially skilled migrants. Compare the USA's Green Card programme with the immigration programmes offered by EU countries...
Now, Canada is to many migrants as attractive as the US, just slightly colder, maybe. It certainly has a reputation as being more hospitable for political refugees than most EU countries.
P2P is just one of many civil liberties, but if one takes the value of migration to a logical extreme, won't we see future governments actively competing for skilled migrants, offering better legal systems, more civil liberties, easier integration, etc. etc.
It's an optimistic viewpoint, but perhaps globalization will bring competition into governance in a way never seen before. Living in a country is, after all, a vote and an investment.
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/* DISCLAIMER
This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I'm not even an attorney. If you want legal advice, contact an attorney. What I am saying here is probably 100% wrong and if you do anything based on it, you are a flaming idiot who deserves whatever bad shit is very likely to befall you.
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Arrite, now that that's outta the way . . .
File sharing IS a crime under the No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act if the material infringed has a retail value of greater than $1,000. Read it - if you're convicted, the court will order your computer destroyed AND order you trotted off to chokey.
The poster is correct that Canada and the US have an extradition treaty. However, as evidenced by the recent abortion killer case, extradition treaties are not absolute. France only agreed to give him up on the condition that the US would not seek the death penalty against him.
For me, a hometown example of this is a contemptible piece of human garbage named Martin Pang. This guy torched his family's frozen food warehouse so he could collect the insurance money, resulting in the deaths of four firefighters. Brazil refused to extradite him unless we agreed to not charge him with murder. (Under Washington's felony murder rule, if someone gets killed during the course of a felony, you go down for murder one.)
Bum deal, huh? Well, not always. Especially during the Cold War, the US and other civilized countries regularly refused to extradite people back to their communist shitpiles^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H countries who were wanted for political "crimes" on the grounds that those were not extraditable offenses. So, it works both ways.
The point is, I'm sure that if someone were charged with a file-trading related crime in America and fled to Canada, the latter would take the position that file trading-related "crimes" are not extraditable offenses. They did so with the Vietnam war draft dodgers - Canada took the position that crimes related to avoidance of military service were not extraditable. In fact, if it's not a crime in Canada, the odds are that they would not extradite.
Hope this clears up any confusion. But read the disclaimer above carefully before you do anything. Plus, I haven't read the extradition treaty, so I could be wrong and it could be an extraditable offense.
We're 1/10th the size of the US. At the time, possibly even smaller, as we've embarked on agressive immigration since WW2. Our casualties were proportional to theirs.
Also of note is that during WWI, 3/10ths of the adult male Canadian population served in the war, and 56,500 were killed, 149,700 wounded. Hell, at Vimy Ridge we had 10,000 casualties and deaths in one day, out of 100,000 men there. We've always shouldered our share.
How about 25 million russian deaths?
What does that have to do with anything?
Once again, we wait to get smacked in the head (Pearl Harbor) before we actually do something.
Do you prefer the more recent scheme of going around and smacking everyone else in the head?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
How about 500,000 US Military deaths in WWII vs. 39,000 for Canada?
Holy shit. Human casualty numbers from a totally insane global war are not a basis for any pissing contest. Please, let's put this one aside.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
It has nothing to do with sovereignty, and everything to do with international law. You know, that thing ALL countries that sign up to are bound by. That thing the US violated by resuming conflicts without either UN approval (resumption of hostilities by the UN side under the UN mandate requires security council approval, if you aren't attacked first) or being attacked first (it's legal to declare war if you are attacked first - and no, 9/11 wasn't done by the nation of Iraq, so no dice there).
Had you considered that Canadians just make better soldiers?
{duck}
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