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Googling May Break Copyright in Canada
twray writes "From The Globe&Mail: Could it be possible that Canada will make Google or any other Internet search and archiving engines illegal?
Bill C-60, which amends the Copyright Act and received its first reading in the House of Commons on June 20, suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines."
So, just dont base any canadian Google in Canada and Just keep google in U.S
The bill defines information location tools as "any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network."
Would that mean that library networks that allow you to find copyrighted material are illegal too? All of the libraries I've been in recently have an online card catalogue which is usually accessable in-house and over the web... Granted they might not be caching materials and making thumbnails but who knows? Maybe the libraries even use site:library.org with Google to do searches.
But, cautions Mr. Knopf, Bill C-60 has received first reading only, and that "there"s a lot of time for them to take this out or to fix it."
He warns that "we shouldn't cripple the Googles of the world by imposing copyright chill on the very basis of their architecture. In fact, they perform a very useful service to copyright owners by enabling easy detection of infringement. The owners should go after the actual infringer, rather than effectively shooting the messenger."
Then why even bother to draft it? This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.
It is similar to watching the original Star Wars movies -- the ones that no longer represent Lucas' artistic vision. By watching them you are breaking a social contract and are probably violating the DMCA. Google is doing the same thing by archiving outdated pages which can still be shown as the result of a search.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Almost nobody who profits from the sale an licensing of copyrighted work is losing money due to competition from search engines. Just the opposite in fact. Most people who create work whether art, photography, music, or writing also would like to be ranked highly in search engines--in fact many people actually pay google for advertisements. I don't really understand who is gaining anything from this. Seems like a law that hurts everybody involved.
Short and sweet: This is what happens when legislation can't keep up with tech, and legislators don't understand tech
Look at some of the stuff here in the states- I mean, a bunch of 200 year old Supreme court judges making laws about P2P when they dont even use email????
I thought Canadians had a reputation for being reasonable....
If Google is outlawed, only Outlaws will Google.
I have to go, I need to google tyrany.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Shouldn't it be up to the individual holder of the copyright to decide whether or not they want their copyrighted work to be publicly searchable or not?
For once in a long time, another country will have more restictive copyright legislation than the U.S.! I'm not quite sure if that's good or bad, but at this point, I'm quite happy that at least it isn't happening here. (not meaning to be spiteful, but after the DMCA and copyright mania here, I'm looking for any signs of it possibly slowing down in America, and I dont know how to interpret this)
Maybe as google is looking around for its next acquisition it should consider Canada. I'm sure the accountants could find synergy of some kind there.
I think they're aiming at things such as torrent & eMule search engines not Google and Yahoo.
Trolling is a art,
The sad fact is that most users use search to find anything. In fact, a great number of users will put a domain name in the search engine to find a site, rather than enter the address itself.
So, what this means is that Canadian e-business will go straight down the tubes.
Brilliant foresight.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Even law makers use Google. I'll eat my slashdot user number if this becomes law as now written. They'll find a way to make it more reasonable.
That said, "more reasonable" might not be enough, and I'm tired to seeing our rights to information eroded. I gain more and more respect for Mr. Stallman each day.
Most regulations, such as this one, exist not to protect anyone, but just to make lawyers rich. It doesn't matter which side the lawyer takes, plaintiff or defendant, they both stand to make good money off of ambiguous and overly broad laws. Stuff like this just proves the old saying, "in a town with only 1 lawyer, the lawyer will starve but in a town with 2 lawyers they will never go hungry."
On both sides of the border we make no pretense of electing people who actually know what they're doing. Almost every politician is a hack these days whether in America or Canada, and that probably applies to most countries in general. Look at that POS proposed by Leahy and Specter in the US recently. These lawyers and buisnessmen don't know a damn thing about the ramifications of their legislation most of the time, and when they do, malice is frequently their motivation for the diabolical implications of its scope. Is it any wonder why liberty-minded people tend to just eschew regulation altogether these days since most of the time, we have to choose between scoundrels and blithering idiots for our lawmakers?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
It won't, because the conservatives aren't stupid enough to vote for it, and it would be suicide for the NDP. Only the Liberals and easily bought bloc MP's would ever allow this law to pass. Someone needs to create a pamphlet to educate other canadians on the stupidity of these Liberals. I have faith in the system, however. There is no economic benefit to canada in introducing draconian copyright restrictions under the misleading advice of overpaid heroin injecting music mogals and the media.
Surfing random IP Addresses.
For the ones that have decent content, I'll carve the number into my wooden desk.
Karma whoring
I don't care which it is, this isn't right.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
It sounds like we need new directives in robots.txt to categorize what's permitted and what's not permitted regarding caching, archiving, display of conextual text around a search hit, time-to-live, copyright jurisdiction, etc.
If some countries want to implement asinine policies, at least sites should have the decency (and the means) to let global information services, such as Google, respect those policies.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In my opion and experience, google is a good thing for webmasters. If you don't want people to see something, don't put it on the internet. Its that simple. Hell, if they took away google from canadians, I would lose half my traffic. Most of my search engine refferal URLs are from google.ca
It seems to me, that lawmakers are having to rush to catch up with the internet in much the same way the automobile revolution caught them with their pants down. Early on their were laws restricting cars to 4 miles per hour in some cities and townships, and at least one place where a person had to walk in front of the car with a lantern to warn people. Traffic law went through a lot of permutations as society tried to deal with the sudden ability for people and goods to be moved from place to place with ease. I think that's a pretty fair analogy of where we are at now with intellectual property.
Except the analogy breaks down when confronted with the fact that there are companies in position to achieve, or at least maintain, obscene profit levels by preventing the expansion of intellectual traffic flow.
Did you mean: tyranny
With the minority government here, it's unlikely that the parties even agree to agree on lunch breaks. They had a hard enough time passing the budget (underhanded tricks aside)...never mind anything else. Besides, why would they pass a law to limit caching when 'robots.txt' can accomplish the same thing?
What BS all this is. How about a legislator putting out laws to ensure that we can keep using copyrights the way we have been for years, which has been giving us all a useable Internet, and hasn't done anything to harm the copyright owners? It hasn't made them as rich as mathematically possible, but that's not their right. The copyright is a temporary infringement of our rights to free expresion, justified because total free expression can clash with capitalism, without which our society *would* collapse. But search engine summaries don't conflict with that. They enhance capitalism. So where's a useful legislator, rather than these useless losers, sucking on the public tit *and* the corporate bribery tit at once, kicking our rights to the curb?
--
make install -not war
It should be widely known by any webmaster that you can simply place a robots.txt in your index folder and Google, archive.org, or any major archiving service will simply leave your whole site alone. No questions asked. It seems that going after google for something that would only take 5 minutes on your behalf is a little overboard.
I don't think the mosquito is the only thing the shotgun hit...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
This seems crazy if you ask me. It would be like if I saved old copies of flyers from my local grocery store. Just because I can see old content that may no longer be relevent, I am breaking copyright? If someone asks me for the May 2001 Walmart flyer and I give it to them, am I a thief? Luckily Google is rich and can hire good legal help.
Voice your opinion!
...the Canadian version of Google will be better and cheaper than the U.S. one, even if it takes several months to get a result.
Stop getting worked up over nothing. This is an initial draft, it wont be passed as law as is. This is just an attempt by the media to garner paranoia about some future restricting law because it will make them money.
Just chill out and don't worry, Canada is not so stupid as to pass a bill that could possibly be as damaging as this.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Google is not providing. They are not making it available. They are indexing its already existant availability and providing a link to it.
If someone makes it available, it would have been "provided" whether or not Goggle indexed it and provided a link to it.
Holding a search engine liable would leave them all open to sabotage by people posting copyrighted stuff and getting it indexed.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If I put a website online, even if it's contents are copyright, surely anything which brings traffic to that website cannot be held responsible for subsequent abuse of the content? This is especially true if the intent of the person/tool which brings the traffic to my site is not to breach copyright but to connect visitor with content?
If this can be banned, then we have to hold the Yellow Pages publishers guilty if a bank robber looks up the address of banks...
(IANAL, as if you couldn't guess...).
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Any information can be copyrighted. Simply placing your name and year next to an original work provides copyright protection. Countries have different methods and laws governing copyright works, so I would wonder how feasible it is to place this type of regulation on information that is gained through public access.
Recently I looked into META tags, and saw a copyright META TAG. I found it odd, but this _could_ provide a solution for indivuals. But in further looking, I see the robots: NOINDEX rule, which would prevent a search engine from cacheing a page at all.
The "good" search engines adhere to the NOINDEX rule, while the other "less than forward" engines will ignore it. This can be used as a cross-hair for the copyright lawyers to focus on.
The problem of authors being concerned over copyrighten work can not be solved by making it illegal to cache a page; you then open up a can of worms in regards to search engines, web browsers, and software programs which all cache data in one form or other. By using an already emplaced acceptable standard such as NOINDEX, a webmaster can ensure their copyrighten work is accessible only by direct visitation.
My Thoughts, Kyndig
Man... guess Google will just have to buy Canada... or just make them illegal... because in the end, it's really GOOGLE's choice isn't it?
In other news...
- Brain memory is illegal.
- Brain caching is illegal.
- Retaining memory of what you read in this article, and sharing it with your friends is illegal.
We see bills, drafts, laws and whatnots proposed every week that all seem completely absurd. As if law-makers and the powers that be were testing us, just to see if we're still awake...
Yes, sometimes we're shocked and react and post on slashdot and comment, etc.
But how many stupid laws that have been voted can you count? How many patents are you infriging when you breathe? How many copyrights do you violate when you whistle a tune? Are we really awake?
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
...I'm moving to the US.
Politicians don't draft bills, their staff does, and their staff is just an aggregator for lobbiests. So our representative democracies are really a distributed, collaborative, bill-authoring device. (ie: They could be replaced by a very small Wiki.)
As for Bill C-60, I figure it's better if some lawyers make some $ than the government infringing on my fair use rights, so I'll write my MP and tell them to support it, then wait till the Supreme Court sorts out the mess.
Anyone who would agree with this working in the stated way obviously needs a good slashdotting, so they can see for themselves how useful services that mirror their page (such as google's archiving) are....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Does anyone else find it funny that the copywrite lawyer looking over the bill shares the same last name as Alfred A. Knopf the famous publisher? The Knopf name is still used to this day as a book publisher even though Random House purchased the company from Knopf in 1960 and he is long since dead.
O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and fr[censored]!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and fr[censored]!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
I think they should search for a better solution than this amendment.
The music industry is the culprit behind this one. They have been at odds with the radio broadcasters & DJs who regularly make copies of music as part of their processes (editing for length, fade-in/fade-out, etc., clips). The music industry wants to get royalties for each copy the radio station & DJ makes, even if the listening public only hears it once.
They even tried going after the makers of CD players at one time for the data caches in the electronics.
For a second there, I totally misread the headline to mean that the Canadians are so enamored with Google and it's "Do No Evil" philosophy that it granted Google a special right so that it "may break copyright". But can you blame me? Canada has always been more progressive and ahead of everyone else -- this is coming from a Texan!
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Breakfast served all day!
Gee - who would have guessed flamebait for that post? brought to you by slashdot, a wholly owned subsidiary of google
As a Canadian who claims to be "terrified" by this legislation, what exactly are you doing to prevent it from passing? The least you could do, of course, is write letters to your MP. You could even meet with them concerning this matter, and show them first hand the terror you feel. What are you prepared to do then? Will you picket? Will you organize rallies against this legislation?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Now the great Canadian firewall will... oh wait we don't acually enforce our laws!
I did some research (using Google, oddly enough) and found a petition against most of what is in this bill.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/
Indeed, that is something that all Canadians who are against this bill should sign, no doubt.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
so... does this also mean that the little card box at the library that tells you where the books are is also illegal?
i guess libraries are going to have to knock the books off the shelves to avoid the appearance of a dewey decimal system.
Check out 64.233.179.104 -- there's all sorts of neat stuff there. Better hurry before the cops shut it down.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
can be found here
Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
That Pols inserting their heads up their ass whenever it comes to technology is not a USA only thing.
But with a recent NYTimes piece making a case for the death penalty for script kiddies... and the pervasive atmosphere of ignorance driven hysteria towards IT, my question is how long before we actually start seeing the witch hunts begin in an earnest attempt to gain strong governement control of the internet?
And if a programer floats like a duck, what then?
That means Canada will be slashdotted eternally hahahaha
Thats what happens when politicians think they know how technology (or anything else for that matter) works.
Beta Sucks
but but.. they are like America's brother who does everything right and we pick on because of it :(
Let's cut the incentive back to 14 years, as with patents. That way, society can stimulate more production from 'artists' and their corporate masters. If they want more cash after a decade and a half, they'll have to work for it, like everyone else.
...and the RCMP showed up at my door and non-threateningly halled be off before a magistrate who, in the nicest tones, warned me that being a good citizen, ay, required me (too strong), allowed for me to follow...
Shit, what happened to the days when jackbooted thugs would burst through the door, rip your child from you arms and send him off to Cuba? Where is Bill Clinton when we need him?
Damn, the RCMP has just shown up again and suggested that I am being anti-Canadian, or, as he non-threatenly held my nuts over a bear trap, suggested that I get my American ass back over the border.
We sure get a lot of posts about the possibility of laws being passed that are just going to royally fuck our ability to do (insert valuable action), but few of them ever pan out. It's good to be informed about these things, but do we need all the, "Well the libraries...!" and "Man those old, rich, white men just don't understand technology!" Instead of spending your two minutes writing a slashdot post, write to someone in the goverment. If it's not your government (canada's not mine) then I'm sure you know someone whose government it is. Tell them to write or call in. Unless it's China.
australian project gutenberg is better than the original.
I'd like to say how smug and pleased I feel that, just this once, it isn't the United States with the new idiotic copyright law to push through -- that someone else is doing something stupid in the IP world that the US is doing right. Makes me feel downright patriotic. In the US, *we* don't hate archive.org and Google. So there!
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
IANAL.
However, the copyright holder needs to contact the source in question to have material removed. And, as far as I can tell, can only file an injunction. Reading C-60 myself, it reads as if it's making an exception specifically for search engines such that it isn't illegal copyright violation until such an injunction is filed.
Makes sense that, if you ask a search engine to remove your content, they would comply. Just like most comply with robots.txt and whatnot.
This bill will die on the floor of the House of Commons because Parliament will disolve well before this makes it out of comittee.
This is almost like reverse 'US politicians are going to eat me syndrome' from the US where whenever a stupid bill is proposed a dozen posts pop up threatening to move to Canada.
Breath.
The bill has not been passed into law. The bill has been vaguely considered. The likely scenario is that some crotchety old bastard who doesn't even own a TV in the northern wastelands of Canada who was elected by his four neighbors, which live 100 miles away (giving him a solid 90% of the vote), was given a wet dream bill by a lobbyist going through the motions to receive his paycheck. Someone politician owns a computer a thousand blood thirsty lobbyist representing any industry hurt by said bill are going to descend upon the capital and decry the bill as the music industries attempt to trying to eat Google, libraries, and small children. The liberals are going to recoil in disgust at the realization that bill might help the music industry, and the conservatives with a hard on for Google or some other corporation will promptly decry the bill as undue government interference. It will then be completely lobotomized and be reworded to either say, "It is illegal to provide copywrite information location tools powered by babies pulled from their mother's wombs" or turned into a poison pill of a bill and be reworded to say, "Canada will construct a tower of dead babies from which the music industry can lord over the small people of Canada as Gods".
Whatever version they pick it will be written in both French and English.
Both sides will make long winded speeches that has nothing to do with the law being discussed. These speeches will get chopped up and put into campaign literature.
The campaign literature will also be in both French and English.
It will be a unanimous voted on either way, either against making a tower of dead babies or for making it illegal to run a device powered by dead babies. Whatever the case, at the end of the day, the political system will defeat this bill in its own kludgy and ham-fisted way.
So breath, no one has to move to the US to escape the iron fist of the Canadian government.
Copyright laws and the internet don't mix. What a new and interesting concept.
- Any company that wants to put copyright material on their web site, but doesn't want it indexed, should learn about the robots.txt file.
- As stated in TFA, the law would make any search engine illegal. Given that hiding your site from all search engines makes it pretty much invisible to the rest of the internet, why bother to have a public web site anyway?
If they want to do something real, make ignoring robots.txt actionalbe.150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Google feeds off everybody's work to make billions of dollars.
The Google mail system combined with Google Earth(or the simpler Maps), Orkut and Blogs is the end of privacy.
Not only is Google a major threat to our constitutional right to privacy but it is also a major leech of other people's copyrighted material.
Google does not produce one line of content, their news service leeches other agencies' work, their search engine leeches everybody's web sites...
Sometimes you just gotta ask yourself how something as absurd as google goes by loved by everyone and adored as if it were anything more than a huge copyright infringement case.
They provide a nice service, granted. But this service is based on our content, shouldn't we get a share of the revenue? No! Instead we PAY to have ads on their results which in turn are 100% our content. I'd like to meet the marketing genius that convinced everyone to produce content so Google could feed off of it.
If you go read some SEO forums you'll see that the google representatives tell you to produce tons of clean content and you'll rank higher. AH GENIUS! Give them MORE free content so their engine offers more of YOUR work to others, make THEM more money against your work.
AH! As if it weren't enough, Google runs on open-source software because they HAD to leech other people's programming too. They developed proprietary tools, a proprietary, secretly held algorithm WITH open source tools!!!! Google developed a fascinating distributed filesystem and guess what WE THE DEVELOPERS OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE WHICH GOOGLE LEECHED DO NOT GET TO SEE IT!!!!
In short : Google produces nothing, they organize your stuff for you without you asking for it, and they get really well paid for that. They use open source tools but give nothing back to open source, they use your website and they give you some traffic in return, traffic which your content earned anyway.
Don't want to make any friends by this, I'm being honestly open about what I think of Google and I'd like other opinions on this and why I may be wrong.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
This bill won't likely pass before a long time, because the minority government will likely call elections next year, and there are more pressing concerns than kow-towing to big media.
Might as well just make the Internet illegal.
You think Google is the largest influence on the web ? You dimwit, Google USES the web and searches the information published by OTHER PEOPLE, on THEIR WEBSITES. If these people don't want Google indexing their stuff, Google better not index it. The law won't expect these people to specify things in the robots.txt file. I am just waiting for the string of copyright infringement lawsuits to begin in the US and Canada against Google. These will surely take Google down, and then Microsoft will finish the party for them.
When a company is worth $80 billion, it has to be sued for SOMETHING. And this happens to be a very good reason as well. So not only will they be sued left, right and center, expect them to lose billions. Google search will get DEMOLISHED by copyright issues in the near future. And then they won't have enough money left to bring gmail out of beta. This is the classic story of the American corporation - first the scientists come, then the VCs, then the investment bankers, and then the lawyers. And we all already hate lawyers.
Imagine for a moment that Google disappears from the face of the Earth, right now. Now does it make ANY difference at all ? It doesn't. Exactly.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right now, Google has a very large number fo machines for doing nothing but simple crawling and categorizing of the net. If this is enacted, then search engines will no longer do a pull. It will ALWAYS have to be a push. MS has almost certainly modified Longhorn to push to their search engine, by default. And since it was a push, MS can argue in court that the customer is responsible. Even if the gov. decides to sue, it will take years. In the mean time, Google will be denied access to the raw data, and MS will have it all.
I would not be surprised to see a ms very-friendly hand behind this bill.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you don't want everybody and his dog to see your website then why is it on the web?
Here is the scoop. The Bill is ISP friendly (no liability for being the means of communication by which copyright infringement occurs), and will likely be Google-friendly by the same provisions. What we have is a Bill diluted from the insane brainchild of the Liberal-Heritage Ministry-Copyright Lobby circle jerk thanks to various factors, largely thanks to the efforts of everybody-who-isn't-a-blood-sucking-copyright-lobb y-group.
The Bill will go for second reading when parliament resumes, and will probably get passed before the minority Liberal government calls a vote in late winter/early spring. PM Martin has control of the government thanks to his willingness to give the NDP the budget ammendment reach-around, the Conservative leader's brilliant alienation of his only allies (the separatist Bloc Quebecois), and the voting tendencies of the Canadian public (no matter what the Liberals do to prove they are corrupt, voters in Ontario will still vote for them whether or not Stephen Harper keeps ramming his foot in his mouth).
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
WAIS(wide area indexed search); basically a distributed search engine. But it was owned by a company who wanted LOTS of money.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's the fundamental difference.
They only tell you, how to achieve higher ranking, thus offering a mechanism you can use, should your policy happen to include trying to be as visible as possible. But they do not impose a policy.
Your attempt to base any demands on Google's use of open-source is particularly disturbing (and is sure to add more weight to arguments against it)... You are attaching strings to it, that would make it less desirable, than even the proprietory offerings. At least, with those the rules are clearly set upfront and no one will come back later demanding "their share".
If you, actually, have contributed something to an open-source project (beyond installing a free OS or posting a screenshot), then grin and enjoy the recognition, your hobby is getting.
And if you have not (which I find to be more likely), than pick some sort of unpleasantry usually intended to shut an opponent up and direct it towards yourself...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Like seriously, dude.
Canadian politicians waste a lot of their time on proposals and posturing, knowing full well that it's not going to pass into law. The one advantage to the public is that a few politicians gains some education as to why a proposal is a bad idea. Of course the politicians themselves see it primarily as an opportunity to grandstand and garner some attention for all the "work" they do.
Don't forget all the civil servants and contractors who'll be hired to "study" the issue so amendments and changes can be proposed. All in all it should take them a good five years and a half to a few million dollars to decide that it's ok for search engines to crawl websites that are implicitly copyrighted.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is Canada - you can't carve an address on a wooden desk or the beavers will have eaten it by the next morning!
Next you'll be saying we should write addresses on our body in honey, only to be savaged by grizzlies overnight.
Oh, almost forgot - "eh"! Sorry, required by law.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is just great. Making it illegal to look for anything. You may only watch/hear/read what you're given by your corporate masters. The internet essentially turned into television, where only those with big money for advertising will be heard. Now what do we say to those that call Canada "America Junior"?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I am amazed at some of the comments to this.
A lot of laws that have been passed in the US and Canada started off as rough drafts. The language exposed to the public for sole purpose of gauging reaction. It's one of the few benefits of democracy.
Politicians are not trying to claim they know how the internet works, which is why this bill will go through many rewrites before it is passed into law.
People need to relax a little bit more. People always go insane at the first sign of (subjective) trouble and refuse to wait for results before throwing around useless slander and misinformation and propaganda.
And it's not just bills, but everything in life. Two people get bitten by sharks, and suddenly there is a media driven frenzy over shark attacks.
All this brouhaha just goes to show how easily manipulated the most powerful element in a nation is: the mob.
Even the article itself said quite clearly:
But, cautions Mr. Knopf, Bill C-60 has received first reading only, and that "there"s a lot of time for them to take this out or to fix it."
br. And even if the bill as it is now does go into law, something will get passed to amend that law to fix it, because who do you think will win, the music industry, or Google in a country like Canada? I'm putting my chips in with Google.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
it is not about information location. it is about illegal storage and redistribution of copyrighted material if they would be a search engine, as they pretend, there would be no harm to them however... they cache! though shalt not store and redistribute copyrighted information without the owner's consent! basta! this is a very very good start, because AOL's fascist cache is then next....
Doesn't this make the card catalog, the Dewey Decimal System et al, illegal as well. .... wait a second.... this also makes tests in school illegal. Since your memory is a system for the retreval of copyrighted information, aka a search and archiving engine ( The text book is copyrighted ) it would then be illegal for you to use your memory to recall anything. Since it's also illegal to force someone to break the law this would mean a teacher is in jepoardy as well. Since they are aiding and abetting in the creation of a crime.
My god.... Canada just might succeed in making every 12 year olds dream come true.... no more school.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
It just means liberal with spending.
They're a big party and the processes to prevent kickbacks, etc aren't there. When the cat's away the mice will play.
The leader of the opposition, Mr Harper is less hardcore moral conservative than Bush but he still freaks a lot of people out with his charter rights violating morality. Here, getting gay marrage through was pretty much a breeze, as stopping it would have required a declaration from parlaiment that they were passing legislation in direct contravention of the charter of rights and freedoms (aka the not withstanding clause). The clause was added to appease some of the other provences that weren't totally happy with the wording of the charter at the time by giving them an out. Using the clause would be akin to Bush banning evolution and forcing bible class and having to announce, "I'm passing this knowing that it violates the constitution - suck it up".
et al? who says that anyway? what do you do write research papers in your spare time. Do you have government funding? it's only the smaller sites that use robots.txt. and generally they are just copies of the torrents on larger sites like pirate bay torrent reactor (ET AL) etc. which don't use robots.txt
Republicans are jackballs...there, I said it!
Whatever version they pick it will be written in both French and English.
Well, it's good to see they're not skimping on the hard parts...
The problem seems to be that lawmakers and practitioners and publishers, haven't yet found the relationship between the old and new methods of publishing. It used to be that if you wanted some information, pictures, sheet music, recordings, movies, you went into a shop, paid the man some money, and received a physical object. You could order it by mail, and subject to payment and shipping constraints, get the physical object delivered to some physical address. There are libraries (physical ;-) of legislation and case law to deal with the copying of physical objects.
/. effect, but also as a claim of ownership on the material.
That nice Mr. Berners-Lee has given us a mechanism by which the information, pictures, etc, can be delivered instantly to anywhere on the planet without a coin being touched. If somebody puts material on a publicly accessible webpage, isn't this the same as putting it on a soapbox outside the shop front door? You have lost control over who can read it, when or where. You rely on trust in the unseen client to respect any copyright notice, which may or may not be required by law, and may or may not be prominently displayed on your page, and may or may not be applicable in the jurisdiction where the reader resides.
Secure access tied to an online payment system establishes a more formal contract between supplier and client. Anecdotal evidence suggests that those who have paid, even 99c. per track, are much less likely to throw it out on p2p. Some web-based newspapers are moving to a subscription model, partly to bolster income from flagging print sales, partly to avoid some of the
Reliance on robots.txt is a folorn hope. There are already no-cache directives in the http protocol which should provide stronger protection. My own radical opinion is that the sum total of human knowledge belongs to all mankind. I believe this thinking is behind the GPL and Creative Commons. So the question then devolves to: How do we get clues to those of the law whose main concern is to divvy up the credits for contributors and debits from consumers? How do we get them to look up from their bean counting and see the big picture?
I've always found people in Texas fairly rude, although not as rude as the general populace in Florida. Perhaps I only encountered the unarmed citizens in either. :roll eyes:
It just means liberal with spending.
So they're just like our Repubicans and Democrats. Bada bing!
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
The article doesn't say that bill C-60 will make Google illegal. It says that one lawyer's opinion is that one sentence that is designed to limit Google's and other search engine companies' liability is worded wrong such that it could be interpreted as making Google's caching illegal.
Clearly that is not the intention of the bill, and that sentence will be rewritten before the bill is passed if other lawmakers agree that it has that implication.
So what's the fuss?
Damn... that's probably the best summary of Canadian politics i've heard in a long, long time.
This would include maps, index cards in libraries, and possibly billboards with directions on them?
fascinating. Make it impossible to reference copyrighted materials. Make it illegal to direct people to sources of information etc.
They are being influenced by The Bush Reich most likely. I thought they hated him.
Guess not.
Stupid Humans.....
My lazy MP is too busy crusading against homosexuals to reply to my letter :-@
So I'll have to email him for a 3rd time, and if he doesn't reply it will just be good fodder to defeat him in the coming 2006 election.
DMCA for Canada is not acceptable
Written Friday March 25 2005
Please write your MP on this matter. Use my letter below if you don't want to write your own.
Send your letter for free (no postage necessary when parliament is in session; But in Summer send it to their constituency office I'd reason), to your MP at the following address:
[your MP's name] M.P.
House of Commons
Ottawa ON K1A 0A6
Find their email address, but write by paper mail too.
[fix URL gap] http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/hou se/PostalCode.asp?lang=E
Dear Mr. Breitkreuz
To summarize the issues in this letter:
1. Internet Service Providers should not be required to keep extensive logs of private and legal online communications.
2. The government must not stop Canadian citizens from making personal-use copies of their legally purchased software, music, and movie media.
3. Internet Search engines such as Google.ca, and Libraries must not be subject to penalties for providing direction to copyrighted materials.
Background:
http://pch.gc.ca/progs/ac-ca/progs/pda-cpb/reform/ statement_e.cfm
Here is the reasoning:
The purpose of the Copyright Act is to support creativity and innovation in the arts and culture. To design a new Act on the failed and draconian Digital Millenium Copyright Act of the United States of America, would be a disaster for Canadian culture, and innovation. Also our court system could become clogged with law abiding citizens who make personal use copies of their music, software, and movie collections for no personal financial gain. An implementation of the proposed changes to the Copyright Act would unleash another "Gun Registry boondoggle" onto the Canadian people - creating criminals out of law abiding citizens at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.
Internet Service Providers like Sasktel should not be made to keep extensive client usage logs for possible future prosecution by various copyright-based industries. I don't want to pay for that system to be put into effect, and I don't think most people do. The phone companies are not forced by the government to record the content of phone conversations, only police can do that with a proper warrant. ISP logs are going to be equivalent to phone-taps, and that's a violation of my privacy. It's doing the job of the police, and is for the sole benefit of an industry basing its profits on an outdated business model that is no longer realistic for the Canadian government to protect.
The current version of Bill C-60 suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines like Google.ca. This anti-business, and anti-information clause, is very un-Canadian.
It is completely unfair to be paying a levy to artists organizations for purchasing blank CD media to make home-use private copies of legal CD music, and now to also be unable to legally copy the music I've paid for off of Digital Rights Managed CDs. If copying CD music is going to be illegal, why is the government collecting money from the product for an illegal activity? I'm satisfied that the current levy is helping to compensate artists from illegitimate copying, and no new law is required to prevent me and other people from making sensible backups of our legal music, software, and movie collections.
Your representation in the House of Commons on this matter is greatly appreciated by me, and other sup
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Better burn those card catalogs.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Any judge potentially making this judgement should be made to do without Google for a couple of weeks before adjudicting. And his family.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Microsoft right now is really pushing their integrated web technologies (Search, messenger, passport, etc).
:-P
Don't worry, both them and Google will move to squash this bill if it affects their bottom line. Google may not be an incredibly powerful corporation, but Microsoft sure as hell is.
See, MS aren't always the bad guys
And, as a Canadian, I'm disgusted with my current government. At the rate it's going, if you sneeze in the direction of copyrighted material you'll be a defendant in a lawsuit.
As a student, this really pisses me off to say the least, I'll be writing my MP about this.
just a thought , but are we tackling the copyright question the wrong way? At the moment what seems to be happening is, industry stooges propose a bill severely limiting/removing our rights, we (that is the interested 'we' not the general public) protest and it gets watered down a bit so we only lose a bit of our rights. then que the next round of bills etc.
Joe public doesn't notice much
Would it not be better to let one of these stupid bills pass unaltered then when it is applied Joe public MIGHT actually sit up and take notice.
A bit of a risk but it might cause a bit of a culture change. after all the only thing 'our' representatives are scared of is joe public turning on them ( pressure groups can be played off against each other or marginalized as 'terrorists' or 'criminals' especially with all the paranoia around )
All Canadian law needs to do is say that web search engines *must* observe these controls, i.e. respect the sites' owners in their access controls. There's probably some law already about privacy or copyright that could be extended to cover this aspect of web sites.
However, governments love knee-jerk reactions especially if there's a chance of some political funding from big business lobbyists (or lawyers sensing a way of benefitting from arbitrary and nebulous laws - see the push for software patents).
Google is most certainly providing at least _some_ of the content via the Google cache.
Exactly how am I supposed to find this information that is copyrighted if a search cannot inform me of its existence?
No to IP.
Our government usually is pretty reasonable, but it's in a bit of a crisis on account of the government being a minority. All kinds of strange politcking is going on as the government struggles to survive.
If it went to court, the judge would realize in a heartbeat that it wasn't what was intended by the bill and would dismiss the case. The bill will be ammended within a few years if an actual case ever did come up (which I doubt... this is Canada we're talking about, not the US).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>Bill C-60
False. Bill Gatus of Borg is the 7 of 95.
Sheila: Times have changed
Our kids are getting worse
They won't obey their parents
They just want to fart and curse!
Sharon: Should we blame the government?
Liane: Or blame society?
Dads: Or should we blame the images on TV?
Sheila: No, blame Canada
Everyone: Blame Canada
Sheila: With all their beady little eyes
And flappin' heads so full of lies
Everyone: Blame Canada
Blame Canada
Sheila: We need to form a full assault
Everyone: It's Canada's fault!
Sharon: Don't blame me
For my son Stan
He saw the darn cartoon
And now he's off to join the Klan!
Liane: And my boy Eric once
Had my picture on his shelf
But now when I see him he tells me to fuck myself!
Sheila: Well, blame Canada
Everyone: Blame Canada
Sheila: It seems that everything's gone wrong
Since Canada came along
Everyone: Blame Canada
Blame Canada
Copy Guy: They're not even a real country anyway
Ms. McCormick: My son could've been a doctor or a lawyer, it's a-true
Instead he burned up like a piggy on a barbecue
Everyone: Should we blame the matches?
Should we blame the fire?
Or the doctors who allowed him to expire?
Sheila: Heck no!
Everyone: Blame Canada
Blame Canada
Sheila: With all their hockey hullabaloo
Liane: And that bitch Anne Murray too
Everyone: Blame Canada
Shame on Canada
Ohhh...
The smut we must stop
The trash we must bash
Laughter and fun
Must all be undone
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuus
It was only a matter of time before some ditz came up with this idea. Seriously, What functional difference is their between a search engine searching out and finding copyrighted material- from pictures to music to warez -and your average filesharing program? Frankly, I'm surprised search engines have remained immune for so long as companies randomly try to put the torch to the numerous p2p entities populating the net. People have been OK with that little bit because of primary type of traffic that flows across a given file sharing network- that being copyrighted -was "evil", even though that same network has very legitimate uses in the freeware/media domains.
And now lo! We're all surprised to see it spreading to search engine sensorship. Damn if there ain't a big wopping "I told you so" waiting for somebody out there.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Disclaimer: this is ivory-tower thinking. Of course it matters.
In Canada, P2P file sharing is legal (or at least easier to get away with), so all people have to do is share Google searches via P2P networks...
havent these ppl heard of robots.txt?
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
If this passes, I have a great solution. Google can just firewall out all Canadian IP addresses. Since half of all Internet usage is via Google these days, this will effectively be an Internet Death Penalty for Canada. That'll teach em! Heh heh heh...
(Yes, yes, I know geographic IP address blocking is iffy at best. It's a joke.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Some laws are really !! hmmm interesting !!
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
and Tvguide, and tourist guides, and news paper classified.... also... the card catalog in the libraries.... oh... let's start the book burnings now...
If these people don't want Google indexing their stuff, Google better not index it.
Wrong.
If you don't want it to be indexed, do not post it to a medium where being indexed is an important part of what makes that medium work to begin with.
When a company is worth $80 billion, it has to be sued for SOMETHING.
I'm sure some lawyers believe that. It provides excelent job security.
To the rest of society this is absurd and a big waste of time and money.
If ya ain't paying for it, being taxed on it, or own the copyright, it must be illegal.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
it is totally obvious to anyone with a brain that they are not going to make ALL search engines illegal. That wouldn;t make any sense. What they are doing is making search engines who's main purpose is to locate material that if distributed would be construed as copyright infringement. It's bad wording, but i see so many people (including the editor) acting like children when this comes up.
do you people (aimed at the people that think this applies to everything with a copyright, as opposed to only items which are unauthorized for distribution) ACTUALLY believe that this law would apply to a regular search engine?
GET A CLUE
it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines.
Somehow I doubt it. 99.9% of the web is copyrighted, after all.
Oh yeah?
1. Pick random top 500 company
2. Sue for random reason
3. Profit!
If that was the case, I'd be rich in a few months! IMHO, sueing someone/something should only be done when there is a valid reason (or at least something that looks valid) - this is not one of those cases.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
On copyrighted materials, but imagine the internet wdevoid of search engines. How many countless hours would any given person waste trying random links looking for things.
Does this mean that Sites that contain links too other sites count as well?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200507131 42107477
You have to realize something, in Canada we don't actually have the balls (or arrogance) to go ahead and enforce such frivolous things. For sure, we won't be going after Google. Pretty much the only thing that's specifically designed to piss people off in Canada are traffic laws, otherwise it's all just "toolchest" legislation that we _can_ use should the need arise to stomp out some unethical capitalist pricks.
In this case, it's quite simple really: This law was conceived to slow down piracy within our borders. It's nothing that wasn't already illegal to begin with, they just made it very specific to go after Torrent trackers and the like. That's why things like The Pirate Bay have to host in Sweden or wherever. If they were to host their stuff here in Canada, we could sic this search engine law on them and shut them out with a much easier legal fight thanks to the specific wording.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It is a conflict of interest to have lawyers in charge of making laws. They are the one group that benefits not from the content of laws written but from the sheer volume. Like tax preparers, they have a vested interest in increasing the complexity and volume of the body of law, but not the quality thereof.
Putting lawyers in charge of lawmaking is a recipe for bad law. The only thing that won't happen is the outright repeal of any law. If there's a problem, an ambiguous ammendment can certainly deal with it.
Unfortunately for us, lawyers are about the only people with enough time and resources to actually run for office...
(speaking of ammendments, has anyone else noticed that they tend to get longer and less legible with increasing number? )
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's kinda funny to see the old systems having trouble with the new ones...
The Great Firewall of China, international copyrights issues, etc.
I wonder what the future holds... if the Internet will shatter the old systems, or vice versa...
There can only be one explanation for this:
US lawmakers have infiltrated Canada. Gotta be. We tried, really, we tried to keep them at bay and tied up enough down here "working" that they wouldn't bother you nice folks up north, but it's pretty clear from this story a few of 'em escaped and got loose up north.
Damn, I'm sorry.
Maybe we need better border security with you guys after all.
http://interreality.org/~reed/tmp/google_copyright ed.png
My browser is a tool, that, through its use of a DNS, which is just an instrument, through which I locate information, by converting a url into a ip address (location) to a page (information). Well then the page is cached on my computer. So browsers with a cache (all of them) would be illigal.
However even browsers without a cache have to hold the information on the home system, even if only for a short ammount of time, in order to display it.
This could also kill things like web proxys, which cache sites, or even an ISP that the information is put on, could get sued. After all, giving the site an ip address is a method of locating it.
There are some real geniouses out there, who dont have a clue how the internet works.
All search engines should join together and pull any sites (and any that link to it) out of their search indexes that try to sue over something like this. :-)
You can't keep a copy of the page... what if you took a picture of the screen with a digital camera? Or printed the page? Is that violation? Or is this an eifel tower kinda thing where they own the copyright on a picture? (likeness) (eifel tower copyright on the image of the tower with lights)
So what if I print the page? What if I take a picture? what if google takes images instead of copying the HTML?
Stupid lobbyists.
Even better, if a company has Copyrighted material on their website but doesn't want it indexed, they should put it behind a HTTP Auth barrier, and use robots.txt.
robots.txt is handy for preventing indexing, but it's also a way that nosey people can find things on your site that you generally don't want them to know about.
-miah
Well done. You've clearly detailed how Canadian politics/government is ineffective/irresponsible. That's not the real problem. The real problem is how do we make them ineffective/less powerful? What I'm looking for is a government that is fairly powerless, and has enough backbiting going on to keep them out of the hair of the common man. That way the only time they'll get around to doing something is when a dramatic failure occurs, and hopefully they'll be able to fix it instead of make it worse.
Or we can keep waiting for the pipe dream of an effective, responsible democracy to take place.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
*saddly wags his head*
*scratches head*
*hands the canadian parliment a can of what-the-fsck*
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
The bill defines "information location tool" as "any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network." Can someone explain to me how that excludes hyperlinks? Anybody with a web page that has a link to another page, as long as the latter has copyrighted information (and virtually evey page qualifies), would be liable, no? So much for Canadians creating web sites, if this idiocy goes through.
You can't let Canada get away with this. Do something!
it's ok to legalize gay marriages and it's not ok to use the search engine?
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/
there's a petition, and a mailing list... please everyone (that live in canada) try to sing that petiton and send it to your MP
Yeah, that won't happen for at least another month or two.
Most parliamentarians, be they Brits or Canadians, or Congressionals or Senators, will ignore emails. A true paper letter will have a far greater impact. Anyone, even an automated digital computer, can throw together and send an email. But a personaly letter requires a greater involvement by an individual. They will see that you care enough about the issue to write and print the letter, to address the envelope, and to mail it. And they may even listen to you, golly enough!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
There are several possibilities assuming Canadian Law is similar to British law, which i belive it is. First of all you will be able to access Google the internet is not a such governed by localities. Second of all las should not be made retrospectivly & usually isn't (only in rare circumstances). If a problem did arise Google could indeed challange the statute & order a judicial review, or they could argue that the law is not retrospective (if it isn't). This is at least my view on the situation, but at the end of the day policing the internet is impossible for idividual states unless you live in the US and think freedom is wrong, but hey if you dont live in the US it's a free world!
There are several possibilities assuming Canadian Law is similar to British law, which i belive it is.
First of all you will be able to access Google the internet is not a such governed by localities. Second of all las should not be made retrospectivly & usually isn't (only in rare circumstances).
If a problem did arise Google could indeed challange the statute & order a judicial review, or they could argue that the law is not retrospective (if it isn't). #
This is at least my view on the situation, but at the end of the day policing the internet is impossible for idividual states unless you live in the US and think freedom is wrong, but hey if you dont live in the US it's a free world!
> If they want to do something real, make ignoring robots.txt actionable.
I'm sure that's a great idea. You know, what with people using incorrect or ambiguous syntax in them, the fact that it's *SO* easy to make bots that comply with them, and the fact that there aren't any sorts of misconfigurations that could expose the content to the bot accidentally without any intentional mischief on the part of either party...
Not that you don't have a point, but I fear you underestimate just how badly the courts can misunderstand how the technology works and just what sort of technical challenges are actually surmountable. Like the Supreme Court here thinking there's some way to actually figure out which files infringe upon copyrights. Ha!
Unless all parties with copyright anywhere submit to binding arbitration through a firm of lawyers through which ALL the content in question passes (something that can scarcely be automated to the scale required by the internet) and also give some way to prove who has whose authorization to do what with what content exactly, it's quite undoable without a massive overhaul of copyright law.
Because I choose a medium that's cheap, that means I essentially give up my copyright? I don't think so.
No -- I pointed out above that Stallman wouldn't like that. To clarify my statement, no, I don't think that you should lose copyright, or essentially give it up.
What I think is that *if* you chose to distribute something to the public (and really to the public, not just doing an iTunes and piping something to a customer via HTTPS a la Apple), you should not be able to say "okay, everything's shut off now". Adobe doesn't put Photoshop up for public download, so it isn't an issue, but they could still sell authenticated access to Photoshop. If you're a photographer and want to demonstrate your work, people still can't take your pictures and stick them in magazines and sell them. The only new thing that they would have a right to do is mirror them -- to present them as coming from you, and to provide public access to them.
I just want "putting something on the public Web" to translate legally to "enabling public distribution for an unlimited amount of time" as opposed to "enabling public distribution for a potentially limited amount of time".
The reason why is that the Web suffers from a specific technical problem that is increasingly important as time goes on -- content is transient. It doesn't stay up for long, as people stop funding servers or pass away or any number of things happen. Allowing this sort of fair use, which would *specifically* legalize archive.org and friends, allows technical solutions to be introduced to solve the problem (mirroring, possibly with content-based addressing, historical archives to be kept, etc). Without this form of fair use, Web content becomes simply impossible to reference due to legal barriers, and hence a major benefit of the Web, and the original intended killer feature (ability to use hypertext references) becomes much less useful.
I think that there are very few instances in which people rely specifically on the ability to time-limit public offerings on the Web, and I feel that the benefits of these instances are far outweighed by the need to ensure that the Web can provide valid references. I can think of a few sites that provide some sort of normally-commercial data (pornographic video, fonts) for a limited time, so one would see "Bob's Free Font of the Week" up for a single week. This sort of thing would not be feasible in an environment that allowed mirroring of public content as fair use. However, I just don't see this need as even coming close to the public need to be able to reference and keep documents available.
Trying to apply the "it's easy, so it should be legal" principle is what doesn't make sense.
Laws are made for a reason -- to modify behavior. If a law is not enforceable, then yes, I don't think that law should exist, and it should be necessary for people to produce systems that deal with a different set of rules. I do not think that it should be illegal to be rude to people, because it is unenforceable, and arbitrarily-enforced law is a dangerous thing indeed.
I am not talking about the elimination of commercial use of the Web. I am talking about eliminating a very specific and rarely-used mechanism (time-limited public distribution) to allow another mechanism that I feel is much more important (mirroring to keep references alive and data from being lost).
Google and Web-based forums and mailing list archives have somewhat reduced the value of Dejanews/Google News, but the amount of sheer knowledge that Deja provided from nothingness, from a forum where any post vanished in a week, was astounding. I want that same mechanism to be applicable to the Web.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
It's CANADA for Christ's sake.
America: Okay, have a cigar.
Canada: Nah, but thanks. We prefer Cuban.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
How do you figure?
Keep in mind that in the last 10 years this party---with the current PM as Finance Minister---has lowered Canada's gross federal debt from over 100% of GDP to under 70% of GDP, making it the only G8 country to have a balanced budget for the last 5 years running, and making it one of the least-indebted G8 nations.
For all the sleaze involved with the Sponsorship scandal (which, if you'll recall, involved barely more money than has already been spent on the inquiry looking at it), fiscal irresponsibility is perhaps the most nonsensical avenue on which to attack the current Canadian federal Liberals.
There are reasons for Canadians to be looking for a new government, but curbing prolifigate spending isn't one of them.