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Canadian Minister Promises to Fix Copyright Law
Mashiki writes "In Canada, we can download Mp3's and their assorted goodness without too much of a hassle, recently the CRIA and their friends lost the court case. Well, it would appear that the new Federal Heritage Minister Helene Scherre, has spoken and those words were: 'As minister of Canadian Heritage, I will, as quickly as possible, make changes to our copyright law.'"
So does that mean the CD-R Tax disappears?
/not canadian
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That a federal election isn't that far off... And slogans like "Helene Scherre wants to put your kids in prison" look great on T-shirts and the news...
Fair enough. Some people download music, some people don't. But consider his quote:
/.'ers comment that the music industry is holding onto a failing business. We don't need them anymore. Despite being wrapped up in the industry by being the winner of a [cheap knock-off] American Idol* contest, he sees the Industry's role as "a new way to survive," as opposed to some criminal challenge that they must overcome.
"I think it's a challenge for the industry, to try and find a new way to survive."
This lends creedence to many a
My hats off to him, especially given his previous quote, "Whether people download or not, as long as they're listening to music."
* Yes, I'm a Canadian. Paul Martin has yet to earn my respect.
This is very bizarre, isn't it. In my country, alcohol is treated in this way: artificially high taxes (meant, in this case, to keep consumption down - for national health reasons, they say), and laws against making your own (for the same reasons, manage consumption).
Ok, the analogy might not be perfect - but shall we treat music as a barely legal drug?
668.5
So in what world is putting a file ... in
a publicly shared folder for others to obtain
_not_ a violation of the copyright act?
The actual ruling read more like an extreme interpretation of "plausible deniability". Basically, while we geeks might laugh at the idea of "accidentally" leaving files in a shared directory, the masses of computer users often really don't understand the difference between what makes the choice of where to keep their music legal or illegal. Additionally, as several of the RIAA's suits showed, some people believe that paying for Kazaa means they have paid for access to the music.
Sounds stupid? Sure, to us. But if the majority of people doing this honestly do not understand whether or not they have broken the law, the law becomes essentially unenforceable. As one possible Devil's Advocate situation, I can imagine someone installing Kazaa for some random legal purpose, then deciding to store all their own legally ripped music in the directory Kazaa conveniently made for them.
Downloading copyrighted materials may be perfectly legal in Canada (albeit unethical
Actually, I'd disagree about the "unethical". Canada has really quite high taxes on all blank recording media, a sort of "we assume you'll copy our stuff, so get your money in the blanks" approach to piracy. Thus, since the punishment comes built-in to the media itself (whether or not they use it to pirate music doesn't change the "tax"), you could reasonably call it perfectly moral to go ahead and commit a crime already paid for.
Haven't you ever heard of price fixing? This should be something along the same lines ;)
From the beginning of CD times, the price to manufacture a CD record has gone down all the time. Yet I haven't witnessed a single price drop in CD prices. Somehow the laws of supply and demand don't work in the record industry and I fail to see how this is not a monopoly/cartel. Think about it: Same companies all over the world. About the same price levels everywhere, regardless of record company or country.
Yes, I do believe politicians are indeed "fixing" things for the record industry. What else is new? Recording industry is just too powerful. The real question is what to do about it. My ignorant answer is that bands should become independent entreprenours and forget about the record companies altogether. 100% is a lot more than 5% or 10% even if you lower your prices a bit. I don't know what the current percentage of profits for the bands is but I do believe some the OSS principles could be applied to the music industry and the rest would be pretty simple to work out with common sense. Or then I'm puffing on the wrong ciggie again.
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.