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Canadian DMCA Coming This Spring
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian government is reportedly ready to introduce copyright reform legislation this spring, provided that no election is called. The new bill would move Canada far closer to the U.S. on copyright, with DMCA-style anti-circumvention legislation that prohibits circumvention of DRM systems and bans software and mod chips that can be used to circumvent such systems."
Two things: In the current political climate, such a bill would not get much traction as there is a minority government who desperately wants to become a majority next election. Bills such as the one described don't get you votes as it doesn't benefit the majority of voters.
Second, it's my understanding that the current state of copyright in Canada is that it is not the form in which a copyrighted work is held (ie DVD, CD, mp3, avi), but the manner in which it is used. So, you can have a zillion mp3s for personal use, but you cannot use them in a publication, or broadcast them without the express consent of the copyright holders.
In my mind, it would be very hard to change current law in such a way so as to preserve the status quo, such as libraries.
Plus, they already tax removable media to compensate the rights-holders of all major video and audio media(while screwing independants... which is another topic for another day), so you'd think that they would either have to remove that levy, or all people to continue doing what they are doing.
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It's not "coming" as the summary suggests, it's only a bill being put forward.
This is just a kneejerk reaction to the rumor about Internet radio stations moving to Canada since the CRB decided to price them out of business.
If I were Canadian, I wouldn't worry so much about DMCA as I would the US pushing hard enough that the Canadian government rolls over on measures that protect their own music and film industries. Hollywood has been losing business to Canadian industry for years now.
The DMCA would just be one measure to strong arm the entire continent into a position of propping up the **AA at any cost to the consumer.
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Taking Sweden as an example, there they tax all storage media (not just "removable" media) with this levy. Actually it's not really a tax (taxing illegal activities is illegal itself), but a state protected fee which a private organization is allowed to collect and without insight into how, distribute parts of the sum to a secret list of copyright holders.
canada has a similar law, although it only applies to removable media such as blank cds. now, normally i like the levy, since it helps keep the copyright rottweilers at bay, but consider this...
i'm in this rock band. we are, as one local journalist stated, "startlingly unsuccessful". so, we record and release a compact disc. it's a run of 500 and we sell, maybe, ten (thanks mom!) and lose a tonne of money. this is not an unusual scenario.
but the kicker is this: we pay the levy on the blank cd's we use for our release. this means that some major-label canadian artist (ms. levign perhaps) is actually making money off of my band's record while my band is losing money.
amazing stuff.
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