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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."
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.
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.
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
I think they're aiming at things such as torrent & eMule search engines not Google and Yahoo.
Good thing lawyers and businesses always follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of it.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
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.
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.
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)'
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.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Maybe it's part of some Free-Trade negotiations...
America: No, You didn't support us in our silly War that we're still stuck in. We are going to Tariff you!
Canada: How about we pass some silly laws so yours look less silly? you know, people are talking...
America: Can you start a war with Albania for no reason so our voting public can be annoyed at you and forget about Iraq?
Canada: Maybe... but lets just start with the silly laws.
America: Okay, have a cigar.
Over at Groklaw, PJ touches on this in an article about Internet Archive being sued article She makes good points such as recommending that site owners utilize subscriptions to protect content that they do not wish to be open to the public domain. The is also a discussion of the robots.txt file that many sites use and search engines honor voluntarily.
Search engines are tremendously effective tools for bringing visitors to web content. Without them, many web sites would go unnoticed. I don't see that attacking the search engines will be effective. I believe that simple solutions such as those PJ has touched on are readily available and easy to implement rather than resorting to such extensive legislation, and I agree that this is what we as citizens need to convey this to our respective governments.
Get some.