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Canada Introduces DMCA-Style Copyright Law
P Starrson writes "The Canadian government this afternoon kept one promise many could live
without. It introduced new copyright legislation that will bring
DMCA-style legislation to Canada (backgrounder
and FAQ
here but bill still not online). Professor Michael Geist has
apparently seen a copy and points out on his blog
that while the bill does not go as far as the United States, the
proposal is full of new rights for the music industry with precious
little for users."
It seems like there's a new story on this a couple of times a week. I remember the very first time I heard anything at all (some Senator was pushing some nefarious bill that alledgedly was going to give some "rights" to the music manufactures to help them "control" music as it became more and more digital...). I laughed out loud to myself (is that possible?). Anyway, fast forward to today, and I'm amazed at the progress the music industry has made.
I watched in amazement as unexpected shills stepped forward to support the music industry in their quest to strip consumers' rights, most notably (or at least the one I can remember) Motley Crue. Further thought brought the logical conculusion these shills were entrenched in the music machine and stood to defend their obscene incomes... The bands that are popular are mostly (not all) there by serendipity. There are tons of excellent musicians out there waiting for their turn. So, Crue, et. al., dig in!
And now? Canada? Blame United States!
Regardless, I wish I wish a cohesive movement could arise and say, "no more", though I don't have a clue how to start that. Any good organizers in slashdot land? I don't know how a movement would manifest, but it seems groups have been able to pressure networks to not show shows, why can't the consuming music public apply similar pressure? I for one would be willing to commit to ZERO purchases of any media (dvd, sacd, cd, etc.) for one calendar year. Others? Other ideas?
When will "the users" realize that they elect the politicians?
Money can buy influence, but in the end it is each "user" in that voting booth that should be throwing out those elected officials that don't respect them!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The people who create something evil, or the people who copy them
Sigs are for Terrorists.
I went to a talk last year given by legal counsel for the EFF about the DMCA, efforts to remove it, and very limited success, and I realized that even the lawyer made one fundamental mistake: they refused to acknowledge that people really do steal significant quantities of music/movies simply because they don't want to pay.
Until the anti-DMCA crowd accepts and acknowledges that, even though they produce crappy music, people are actively stealing significant quantities of music/movies, they will NEVER gain traction against the well organized lobbying groups.
The DMCA contains WAY TOO MANY horrible provisions, but the fact that it's defended so harshly by the RIAA/MPAA is indicative of the fact that they are quite desperate. Yes, the recent music sucks, but no, that's still no excuse to steal it. Until the anti-DMCA side is willing to accept a law that reinforces the standard copyright laws in a REASONABLE manner, there's very little chance that the DMCA is going away.
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Personally, I think this is a very good thing. Considering the massive violations of the music industry rights by piracy, they do need more protection to stop the rampant copyright infringement going on.
Maybe if people respected copyright more, like you guys do with the GPL so religiously, this wouldn't be necessary. But in these times, it is.
?This is an ontopic comment, not a troll. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean its trolling.
when is the recording industry going to start charging for singing inthe shower?
And of course the US doesn't put ANY pressure on other companies to adopt the same corrupt and backward policies.
*.sig
But is it stealing if you never would have bought it anyway. The music/movie industry would have you believe that every download is a lost sale at full retail price, yet you are not railing against this untruth from the industry.
To me, stealing is taking a tangible object. Stealing a CD from a music store has taken something of value that cost money to produce. A download by a person who would have never bought the song, or can't buy the song -- and many versions of older songs aren't yet even for sale as singles -- hasn't cost the industry a cent, yet they claim losses of billions.
There needs to be a better quality of truth on both sides of this issue.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And please try to restrain yourself from the obvious follow-up that they'll never have to do this because eternal copyright is just around the corner.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
AC comments get piped to
The DMCA isn't a problem. It's a nutcase law, I give you that. But it isn't a problem, since the law counts for everybody.
Applied with a good sense of creative nonsense it can protect anybody from anything.
Apply the DMCA to ways to access your personal data and sue anybody who sends you comercial mail into next wednesday.
The DMCA only becomes so oppresive in the US because they don't have the 'loser pays all' paradigm. Which is the only way any civil legal system makes sense. Not having 'loser pays all' is the next best thing to corporate fascism (sic).
Here in germany I have a friend that has trouble with big players in his field bringing up heavy legal caliber against him (he's into booksales on the web and it's about the german pricefixing law for books, even Pearson is involved). He goes to state court this month and if the corporate assholes lose he can carry on doing his business. In the US he'd be broke allready.
Bottom line: Add 'loser pays all legal expenses of trial' to the system and have every hotdog stand apply the DMCA to each and everyt aspect of their small business - and the insanity of this law becomes aparent to anybody with basic brain functions. And it will eventually disapear.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
To me, stealing is taking a tangible object. Stealing a CD from a music store has taken something of value that cost money to produce. A download by a person who would have never bought the song, or can't buy the song -- and many versions of older songs aren't yet even for sale as singles -- hasn't cost the industry a cent, yet they claim losses of billions.
Exactly. The reason theft is wrong isn't that you get something for nothing; it's that you deprive the owner of the use of what you stole. If I take your car, you can't drive; if I take your CD, you can't listen to it. But if I make a copy of a song on your CD, we can both listen to it; I gain something, but you lose nothing. It makes no sense to speak of stealing something that isn't scarce.
Furthermore, even in cases where downloading a song causes someone not to buy it, it still isn't stealing. No one owns their expected revenue, and no one has the right to demand money from everyone who enjoys something they worked on. Negative reviews are responsible for more loss of expected revenue than any illegal copying - should we lock up Roger Ebert for preventing movie studios from getting the profit that's rightfully theirs?
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Did you read the blog at all?
His analysis says pretty clearly that downloading through p2p is still considered legal. It always will be as long as there's still a levy on every blank media purchase.
According to TFA, the real concern is that this *bill* (still hasn't been passed into law) would make it illegal to circumvent anti-piracy mechanisms on CDs and such. In other words, if there's garbling to prevent playing a CD on a computer (and likely old CD players too), it'd be illegal to hook up your CD player's line out to your computer's line in and record the songs directly. Likewise, it'd become illegal to circumvent some proprietary copy protection that collects your name and vitals when you rip a recording for personal use.
The only conclusion I can make is that they really don't want people buying their crap, which is an objective I'm more than happy to help with. If it happens, then I guess my solution would be to switch back to cassettes... for all of one album every couple of years.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Of course, being able to download legally isn't exactly worth much if it's not legal for someone else to upload. That was, IIRC, actually a point made by the original judge in the CRIA case up here, but the appeals court quashed that because it made a conclusion of legality far too early in the proceedings.
Unfortunate, although probably technically correct), because it was one of the most clueful things I've yet to see a court say about the media levy... If you make it legal to receive, you gotta make it legal to give or you didn't really accomplish anything.
c.
Log in or piss off.
5. Talk about the levy placed on blank media that compensates the recording industry.
IMO, this should be the first point to mention, because this argument alone should be sufficient to either destroy completely any ambition from the CRIA to sue people or, at the very least, make the levy on blank media disappear.
But seriously, if the blank medias were not levied, do they even realize I would have hundreds (or most likely, thousands) of dollars in my pocket to spend on CDs, DVDs and shows I truly like. Yes, I buy a lot of blank media.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
I write software for a living. The time it takes to put out a software product is scarce. The money I am payed or which I must invest for creating that intangible and "0-cost reproducible" stream of bits is scarce. Reproduction costs are irrelevant; there must be something to be reproduced to begin with, and that something is scarce.
You're making a classic mistake here. You're entirely correct, of course, that the time it takes to make a program, a song, or a movie is a limited resource, but once that time has already been put into making it, the program/song/movie itself is not scarce.
I also write software for a living, so I know as well as you do that programming time and talent is scarce. But there's a difference between programming and programs. Just like a mechanic or a barber, I don't worry about what someone else wants to do with the fruits of my labor, since I've already been paid for it. The only way someone could "steal" my labor as a programmer would be to sit me in front of a computer and force me to write code.
When you distribute works (books, music, movies, software, whatever) without the copyright owner's permission you are stealing something: the compensation to which the author is entitled for creating it.
If you don't own something, no one can steal it from you - and you don't own potential revenue.
Moreover, the author isn't entitled to get paid just because he made something. If Universal Studios spends $200 million and two years making a terrible movie, and it gets such bad reviews that no one ever buys a ticket, have the reviewers "stolen" something from them? Of course not.
And more importantly, even if everyone who reads those bad reviews decides to download the movie instead of buying a ticket, the studio still isn't entitled to anything. They're in exactly the same situation whether those people download the movie or just sit at home doing nothing; the only difference is that in one scenario, those people get to watch the movie anyway, which harms no one (except themselves, if it really is that bad).
But you must know this already. Otherwise, I must presume you have nothing against taking GPL code and selling it as closed binaries.
Actually, in a world where everyone was free to reverse engineer, decompile, change, and redistribute software, I wouldn't have much of a problem with that. Thing is, we don't live in that world, we live in one where misusing GPL'd code creates an unfair advantage.
But the UNfair use that so many are trying to justify with the above "argument", and which is practiced on a massive scale, makes elected representatives easier to convince that these laws are necessary.
One man's "fair" is apparently another man's "UNfair". Take the trading of TV shows, for instance: last night, due to a TiVo scheduling mishap, I missed the new episode of a popular show. Luckily, I was able to download it via BT a couple hours later. Nothing wrong with that, right? Whether I watch it on TiVo or on my PC, the result's the same: I have a recording and I watch it hours after the show airs.
Now what if I didn't have TiVo, and I just downloaded the show every week? Still fair? After all, whether I pay $13 to TiVo every month shouldn't affect my ability to watch this show; TiVo has nothing to do with the show. Same argument applies if I don't own a TV.
And yet the studios are still up in arms about TV shows being traded, and every pro-copyright argument applies just as well to free-to-air TV shows as it does to songs and movies. Copyright isn't about getting paid, it's about dictating the terms under which someone can reproduce a chunk of information.
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In High School I was involved in the model parliament program.
The 'Senate' is merely a delay to let the real politicians time to prepare for the next reading. They aren't a consolatory body like the British House of Lords, but rather a dirty, antiquated waste of flesh and taxpayer's money. The consolatory committee is made up of MPs, not members of the Senate, with proportional votes to change the clauses to a bill.
You're mistaken when comes to legal representation.
It is far easier in the States to sue for damages as you can pay your lawyer a percentage of winnings, which effectively can pass all the risk to the firm handling your case. This is illegal in Canada.
I run across this reference periodically, and have spoken with a few people who are confused enough to claim to do this.
This is insanely STUPID.
The U.S. doesn't have any laws requiring any level of voter turnout for a quorum or plurality in order to validate an election.
For anyone who doesn't get this, I'm going to present as plainly as possible why not voting is a bad idea, and why it is really your civic duty to do so.
Please undertand this: under our current system, even if only a single vote were cast, an election would still stand. What this means, in simplest terms, is that if the candidate you don't like voted for themselves, and no one else voted, they would still win.
Now.
Think about who actually has the direct power to introduce and vote upon new legislation, including election law. Who? The elected representatives.
NOT VOTING IS NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION. IT IS BY AND LARGE THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM.
Really, it isn't the electoral system itself that's broken. It still does what it's designed to, that is to put into office the people who get the greatest number of votes. By NOT voting, you only aid the very representives you claim to oppose, those you feel don't represent your interests. (It's election campaign finance that's broken. For more on that, read further...)
PERHAPS THE CURRENT REPRESENTATIVES DON'T REPRESENT YOUR INTERESTS BECAUSE YOU DON'T VOTE AT ALL, LET ALONE FOR SOMEONE WHO MIGHT ACTUALLY LISTEN TO YOU.
Accept your OWN responsibility, and ACT upon it instead of simply complaining, or worse yet, simply shrugging your shoulders and claiming that abuse of power, lack or representation, and corruption are simply "the way things are".
To address some of the inevitable responses:
I am, I suspect like a lot of other people, simply fed up with the fundamentally flawed premise of that silly claim.
Now, go back to thinking about the post itself. I wrote this so folks would focus in the content, not upon who posted it.
Yes. Look at any large election. There will be anomolies, There will likely even be a few instances of someone or other trying to mess with the results. I live in Ohio, so suffice it to say I'm certainly aware of this... It's up to US to try to be vigilant and prevent this from happening. And to put pressure on our representatives, and upon law enforcement, to vigourously pursue and investigate such allegations. If you want elections at all, you have to expect someone somewhere will be trying to figure out how to cheat. Think of it this way. If elections weren't still the real source of access to power, why would folks go to the effort to try to influence the outcome? They do because, ultimately, the elections themselves still are that source...
And no, before you go there. I'm not trying to open up a post-facto referendum on the last election. I'm not happy we still have a fascist in office representing the plutocracy and working dilligently to turn the US into some corporate version of an Orwellinan New World, either. But, the last time I checked, anyway, we have to live with it until the next election. I, for one at least, am still looking forward to it. It's still better than not having one...
Money, by and large, doesn't buy votes at the polls. It buys advertising. And, it buys spin doctors. (And, yes, it might very well buy the voting positions of some [insert your opinion on] percentage of the politicians once they're in office.) But, a question for you: When was the last time anybody offered YOU PERSONALLY cash for a vote? Yeah. I thought not... Look at the people around you. It'