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."

Comments

Lawmaking and The Internet

[LowbrowDeluxe]

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.

Let's not go to Canada. 'Tis a silly place.

[yellowstone]

• 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.

Re:Does it matter?

[greenhybrid]

Well, a key difference is that Google only provides information freely available over the Internet! It doesn't store pages that would require a subscription :)

Re:Take that, Canucks

[typical]

I think Stallman might get a bit irritable about that.

I *do* think that if you provide something via the regular, non-authenticated Web, you should be prepared to allow people to mirror that item, and not to have control over when that item *stops* being offered. Because that's just how the Web *works*, and trying to apply meatspace rules to the Web, where costs of replication and distribution are vastly different from meatspace, just doesn't make sense.