Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Music Swappers Win Court Battle
Columbo writes "The CBC has an article today detailing a win for file sharers in Canadian courts. The ruling upheld the right of ISPs to withhold the names and addresses of people alleged to be trading copious amounts of music via P2P networks. The unanimous decision doesn't completely close the door for further action against the ISPs by the Canadian Recording Industry Association."
The Canadian government is planning on changing copyright law to take away many of our rights (luckily, the current minority government probably won't manage to do this).
This petition "is a way of letting Parliament know that you want to be considered and that you don't want your rights to be abraded every time the music industry's profits slip a little." Please sign it if you're Canadian and agree with it.
Second war of Independance? When was the first one? There was that English civil war a while earlier, but America wasn't a country then, dumbass.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Weed isn't legal. There have been talks of decriminalizing carrying small amounts, you'd get fined for having it, not sent to jail. At the same time they'd be implementing bigger penalties against those carrying large amounts and selling it.
Essentially the idea is prevent the average person from rediculous punishments but at the same time crack down on the criminal element.
Marjaunna isn't the serious drug that its been made out to be. As I understand it the original laws were based on a lot of wrong information.
And no, I don't use it nor have I in the past.
The court explicitly overturned the previous decision that file sharing is not copyright infringement. That question, which some people thought had been settled, is now up in the air again. Read this analysis - and chalk up one more point against the Slashdot editors, because I filed a more accurate version of this story and they ran the misleading one.
If you obtain a copy of a song without providing compensation to the copyright holder, your are breaking law and stealing from the copyright holder.
If you use the word "stealing" to describe copyright infringement, then you're lying - it's a totally different section of the law. More importantly, however, Canadian law explicitly permits us to make private copies of audio recordings without paying additional royalties, because of the levy we've already paid in the price of the blank media. Part of the question in this case was whether that extended to "private" copies made over the Net.
You're also ignoring the "fair dealing" (fair use in the USA) exception, and several other exceptions, to copyright; copying without payment is actually quite often legal.
No, it means that in Canada the intellectual property cartels have to go through the existing legal system to get you instead of rewriting laws so that they can shoot you in the street like in the US.
Yes but More than half of the British forces was made up of Canadian militia. I'd say that means Canadians burned it down in 1814.
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Now, on to another silly question - arent canadians charged extra tax on recordable media to offset recording industy "losses"? So if they are getting paid, how can they still go after P2P sharers???
The levy on recordable media is to account for the reproduction of copyrighted works, yes. However, it is only under the provisio that the end user of the copy perform the actual copying.
Case 1: You like a CD I have. You come over to my house, rip that CD on my computer, burn it onto another CD, and leave. No problem.
Case 2: You like a CD I have. I rip the CD on my computer, burn it onto another CD, and give it to you. Copyright infringement.
This is why the recording industry cannot go after downloaders. It is the end consumer of that music that is initiating the copying. On the other hand, uploaders, people who are pushing the file down, are arguably infringing copyright. Of course, we did have that court ruling which stated that leaving files in a shared folder on your computer is equivalent to leaving books next to a photocopier. The downloader is initiating the transfer, and the uploader is just a passive data store.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
This is extremely true in Canadian politics. The area of Toronto I live in is rather wealthy (average family income over $250 000, housing over $650 000, I see a Porsche Cayenne Turbo out my window, parked behind a Lexus RX330) yet every election the signs that go up are Liberal, or after the sponsorship scandal, NDP.
Some of Canada's wealthiest are very left wing, and some even for tax increases. For example Belinda Stronach, a former conservative that crossed the floor and became a Liberal so that the Liberal government wouldn't be defeated. She would happen to be an important business-woman and multi-billionaire.
The ruling allows companies to withhold information, but does not force them to do so. Some, like Vidéotron, already gave the info to the CRIA, and seemed happy to do it.
A rts/swap050421.html
sorry, but that is completely incorrect. there are privacy laws that make it illegal for a business, like an isp, to give out personal information without a court order. the other isp's sent lawyers to argue against the granting of the court order that CRIA was seeking. videotron did not.
however, videotron did *not* give out any information, they only said they would be "delighted" to *if* they received a court order.
videotron's parent company owns a number of record label and media interests, and is a supporter of the CRIA.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/04/21/