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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.
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
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,
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!
Surfing random IP Addresses.
For the ones that have decent content, I'll carve the number into my wooden desk.
Karma whoring
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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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?
Copyright doesn't provide universal control over a work -- indeed, it's quite limited. Reproduction, public performance, preparation of derivative works; these (and perhaps some minor ones I forgot) are the actions prohibited without the copyright owner's approval. Search -- allowing a third party to answer questions by telling another third party about your copyrighted work -- is not on the list.
Extending that franchise is a big step -- a very big step. You're taking actions which are presently available to the public at large, and imposing restrictions upon them -- and, in doing so, making for lots of extra beurocracy in the process. Search, in particular, is a case where this kind of legal restriction simply isn't in the public interest: Why should I be restricted by a 3rd party from telling you about a resource? There are already laws on the books regarding contributory copyright infringement, so telling you about how to access a resource illegally is already out of the question (except in cases where making such actionable would have a chilling effect on legitimate activities; hence the manner in which Grokster's big loss was tied to their intentional promotion of infringing activities by their userbase).
The legal balance already overwhelmingly favors copyright holders over the general public -- the DMCA and similar legislation being largely responsible for that -- and moving it even further in that direction does the public as a whole an unjustified level of harm.
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.
>>Is it right that Gogle is allowed to host
>>copyrighted material, while you are denied to do so?
No but that isn't what this is about.... google would be considered an "information-location tool" so if by chance it indexes a site which hosts copyrighted material (yes I know the possibility is shocking) they are liable.
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).
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.
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 :)
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.
Google does not threaten our privacy because it only indexes things that are already available on the internet. Google isn't breaking into private systems and posting their content on the web, it is just making already visible content easier to find.
They have their right to privacy just as much as you have a right to yours. If they do not want to give up the algorithm or tools they use to index/search, then they have that right. Wishing otherwise does not make it so. And typing in all caps does not make your point any stronger.
They produce a service which people find useful. Just because they don't make a hard good does not mean they do not produce anything.
I think that Google's contributions to the open source field are much more significant than you claim. It is pretty well documented that Google allows their employees to contribute to open source projects on company time. They also have programs such as the Summer of Code where they pay college students to contribute to open source projects.
I don't really know what your problem is with Google. They don't alter your content in any way, and they provide a valuable service to people. If you don't like Google, you don't have to use it.
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".
Two things to feed the troll..
1. Google is a service company, their products(Keyhole, Search Appliance, etc) are extensions of their services really.. They provide a service that leverages other things.
Mining the information of 8 billion pages is not a product, it is a service. One that is hugely useful.
2. You are not, in any way, forced to use Google's services/products. Thus, they are not a the end all of the world, you can simply choose to not work with them. Really, it is easy.
What is google obligated to give back?
You are made they use linux(and other open source tools) but dont 'give back' enough? Well, they seem to be following the terms of the GPL, etc... Just because you wish they open sourced their algorithm(something they have no reason, legal or ethical or logical, to do) doesn't mean they are bad people because they don't. It means you are just demanding something you have no right to.
"Our share" is the service they provide to us. They are a company, not a socialist state.
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?
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).
Fair use.
Let's not forget that a blanket ban would also prohibit the syntax-highlighted snippets that allow you to skip search engine spam-sites. Also, they don't cache sites indefinately, and don't even include images, so you're better off going to the original site anyway - if it's reachable and the content is still available, that is.
And let's not forget, any time I visit a website, I make a copy of it. No one gave me permission for that. It just happens because you happen to publish it on a publically accesible website with no access controls whatsoever. Common sense would dictate that you want me to see it, or you wouldn't have put it online. Now, if I have permission to copy it and to cache it, and obviously my ISP has permission to cache it in its proxy, why shouldn't google? Try defining a distinction in legalese that doesn't cut on both sides. Or how about you don't and you let judges decide where the line is, based on current legislation, on a case-by-case basis. If the balance sways too much in one direction in case law, THEN the laws can be fixed. (No judge would let you archive "all the current books, newspaper articles, movies, and music" under existing law.)
What we're seeing now are corporations lobbying for laws to be changed pre-emptively to redress an imbalance in favor of the public that DOES NOT YET EXIST. In theory at least. Of course in actual fact they're just lobbying for the balance to go entirely their way so they can nickle and dime ordinary Joes like us every living breathing moment. Legislators will figure it out, but it'll probably take 40 years, unless we, the public, also lobby them.
Remember, radio stations were outlawed when they started up in the US, because of copyright. Now they're recognized as a straight up advertising channel for the record companies (payola).
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
Disclaimer: this is ivory-tower thinking. Of course it matters.
Scholar Google provides direct links to papers which require a subscription to access, and also links to those same papers which are either google cached or hosted on a non subscription website, thus pointing to something that would normally require a subscription to access.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
and Tvguide, and tourist guides, and news paper classified.... also... the card catalog in the libraries.... oh... let's start the book burnings now...
No, half the internet usage is on Bit Torrent.
And that's quite possibly the dumbest idea I've ever heard, thank god it's a joke. Seriously though, to point and laugh at a law that hasn't even passed and assume your system is better is just a fucking riot. I'm killing myself laughing over here, please stop. I don't see the RCAA busting down my grandmother's door and arresting her, do you?
-FweE-