Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It seems as if Canada has become the land of the free, while the United States has become seemingly less thrilling to live in. I, for one, would be glad to be able to make legal copies of music and other goods, and only having to pay a small tax on media and (possibly) computer products. This would make it much easier to pay the RIAA and similar evil organizations, and would keep P2P infurioratingly legal.
... you know where to go. No more 3rd-world country that nobody has every heard of (Hurray!)
I have a feeling that emigration to Canada will become increasingly more common if it gets to the point where if you have a file on your computer that may have possibly originated from a P2P network or other illegal source, you could pay hefty fines and jail terms. Will Canada border-hopping now include underage drinking and underage stealing? You decide. So, now if you want to escape the U.S. Justice system
The only problem with this method is that companies cannot track who owes them how much, and which companies get the bigger share of the chunk of taxes. Why not have it so that, people report how many songs they downloaded and what they are, and that determines their tax (or refund, if they haven't downloaded anything). Then, the companies can easily divvy out the money to one another (but some companies will like the equal-split method better * wink wink *)
- - - - - - -
Orppf urp mf y.ppcxn. yflcbi otcnnov C am yflcbi yr n.apb Ekrpatv (Dvorak -> Qwerty)
"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,
Wow....I bet a Canadian company could make a fortune selling high speed Internet access to those in the US, Or possibly just a high speed proxy service.
Then when the RIAA asked them for the user of the IP that is 'stealing' their music...they could tell them to take a flying leap.
Any bets as to how long it will take some enterprising Canadian to come up with this business model?
Or as to how long before the RIAA starts buying off memebers of Canada's parliment, the way that they buy our Senators and Representatives?
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.
Wait a sec, I am Canadian. Never mind.
Read the act more carefully. Back-ups of any and all digital media for personal use is absolutely covered.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
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?
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
Funny, I don't seem to recall the line after "Our home and native land" being "w00t". Is this some new modernized version for the internet generation?
"Glorious and free....ph33r 0ur m4d p2p skillz!"
- Booze and TOTALLY NAKED women in our strip clubs
- Toronto (much like NYC I think) allows women to walk around topless (not that any do, but the possibility is there)
- Casinos popping up all over the place
- An increasingly larger separation of Church and State (hence the allowed gay marriages)
- Better beer
- Cheaper CDs, DVDs, computer hardware, software, and just about any other form of entertainment
- Cheaper medicine
Of course, a lot of this is paid for with much higher taxes, user fees, levies, and the fact we all live in igloos and have to hunt baby seals once the snow starts in August.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
The CPCC levy isn't the only reason why private copying via P2P networks is not a legal problem in Canada. There are privacy laws (about which the US has already complained are a hinderance to their terrorist investigations) that prevent the RIAA from issuing subpoenas to Canadian ISPs demanding their logs and subscribers.
This doesn't mean that your file-sharing information is not inaccessible. If you're sharing music, you'll be fine--you're not in violation of Canadian law and practice. If you're sharing kiddy porn or hate literature, the Canadian police can get the data because you're involved in another crime.
The CBC has a brief article and opinion about this.
If the RIAA was to follow the lead of Canadian direct broadcast satellite providers, they'd make an appeal to morality to address their problem, since the laws here won't help them.
The Seventh Rule: Take others more seriously than yourself, particularly when you are leading them.
I'd like to calm the rhetoric. Sure, common sense would indicate the RIAA's copyrights have been violated. But copyright has been heavily legislated over the past century to the point that common sense or common law is nearly absent. It has such things as compulsory licences and device royalties. Morality should be confined to governing personal actions and advocating revisions to intellectual property law. It is disingenuous for the RIAA to invoke morality when if anything they have had excessive influence in crafting legislation.
IANAL but lets look at the law. Once you know the tokens, legalese is not usually harder to parse than APL :) Apologies for a
US-centric viewpoint but I believe a statutory situation exists in
all other common-law countries with different details. There's an
excellent copy of the United States Code, Title 17 - Copyrights at Cornell.
Chapter 10 covers DIGITAL AUDIO RECORDING DEVICES AND MEDIA .
Particularly interesting is:
Sec. 1008. - Prohibition on certain infringement actions... No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings
Simply breathtaking! The words "this title" mean Title 17, which contains all of US copyright law. The first "based on" means these things are not actionable as contributory negligence ("burglars tools"). The second "based on" means non-commercial use of these things does not violate copyright. Wow!
The definitions in Sec.1001 would seem to include computers. They sure are designed, advertised and used that way amongst others. But all is not [Guns'N'] roses. The manufacturers of these recording devices would seem to owe a device tax that gets paid through the Librarian-of-Congress (of all people!) to the RIAA as specified. There are also requirements related to the Serial Copy Management System. I trust that RIAA have settled this with their long-standing antagonists, appliance manufacturers, now including Dell, HP, et al. But even if not, how does it affect me?
The term "noncommercial use" would almost certainly cover receiving music files to make recordings on a hard-disk. Offering to transmit music files might not be covered and fall under the exceptionally byzantine Sec.114 as an "interactive service". But a lawyer specialising in Copyright law should be able to give a better interpretation including case precedents. The Diamond Rio MP3 player case is probably relevant. Is there a lawyer in the house?
Quoting history from the website of a beer company. Nothing like enforcing the Canadian stereotype.
UNIX/Linux Consulting