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RCMP Won't Go After Personal Filesharers
mlauzon writes "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use (Google translation). Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. 'Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,' Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'"
In a sudden outbreak of reason and common sense, a government has decided that its own people are not "the enemy". The US quickly responded that such subversive hippie-dippy communist ideas will not be tolerated on their doorstep.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'
That's because there is no way to stop it. If I can look at a string of numbers, I can write them down somewhere else. If my computer looks at a string of numbers, *it* can write them down really, really fast somewhere else. And so it isn't possible to stop anyone from making a copy of a digital "work."
You can shut down places where transfers occur, you can *try* to scare people into not copying... but you can't *stop* me from writing down all the 1's and 0's that make up your program or data except to stop me from reading it in the first place. And if you don't let anyone read it, it might as well not exist.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
The RCMP resources are stretched thin like any police force anywhere. Its good to see that they have decided / realized that they have far more important things to do with those resources. Its the right move. I want violent crimes, family abuse, gang related issues, grow ops & drug related crime, and corporate fraud investigated, not children and families who listening to music they downloaded over the internet. I don't need my tax dollars protecting the interests of American megacorporations from children.
Note that this doesn't mean filesharers now get a free pass; the recording industry is still free to prosecute what it views are attacks on its business, but it never should have been allowed to the use the RCMP to do it for them. And its good to see the RCMP come around.
For profit piracy is wrong. Personal duplication/sharing is not.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Basically, people have found a way to get for free what they used to pay for. The fact that they have little chance of being caught have empowered people to break the law, but that's about it. You still have not substantiated your implication that what they're doing is wrong. Just because technology previously made it easy to limit distribution via an artificial monopoly doesn't make it right. You're engaging in the Bare Assertion Fallacy. Justify the state of the law.
And please don't make a lame ass 'civil disobediance' arguement next. If you feel that strongly about it, don't listen to the RIAA's tripe *at all,* pirated or not. So are you saying bad law should be obeyed because somebody makes money off it? Because there's no moral justification in civil disobedience unless it's a great injustice, like segregation? Because it's the law? You're saying the best way to fight bad law is to obey it and mount futile boycott? A debate strategy of telling other people not to bother to defend their position rather than actually presenting arguments in support of your position is intellectually bankrupt*.
* that means "you're a fucking idiot"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Ahh, no I must disagree here. In all seriousness, any law which makes the majority of citizens into criminals by its design is a law which is perverse and illegitimate on its face. After all, laws are codifications of the boundaries of expected social behaviors; if they do not serve that function, they become broken and do damage to the society in which they operate. Laws also operate to describe to individuals in a society that society's priorities; if those priorities do not serve the person whose asked to obey them at least in some bare capacity, then they cannot be expected to obey or respect them. Laws which seem to demonstrate to a public that they are not the priority to be served will only breed disregard for the authority emanating from all laws, even those which are legitimate. This is a corrosive pattern.
This is not a "lame civil disobedience" argument, just a sober view of the facts on the ground: no law can require respect of principles which are not respected, and by and large by their actions many people, especially of the younger generations, demonstrate they simply do not respect the concept of enshrining exclusive distribution rights for digital content. In such a situation, a government may continue to attempt to instill through the use of force such a respect (e.g. also drugs, prostitution), or realize that resources can be better spent elsewhere and instead decide to try to address the issue in another way, such as Canada seems to be doing.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
It seems that the RCMP has looked at the media levy, which, as you mention, exists precisely as a concession to the industry because copying of music for personal use is permitted in Canada. And it has looked at a number of serious copyright issues that do require enforcement, and it has looked at its own finite enforcement resources.
And the RCMP has decided that it makes no sense to target personal music downloads for enforcement. I recall a few years ago that a similar decision was made by the provincial courts here in BC regarding minor drug posession. Not deemed a big risk to society, not enough resources, better things to do with them.
It makes sense to me too. Canada, you'll notice, is not exactly falling apart in comparison to the United States. We actually have a lower rate of recreational drug use than the States, according to a report aired on CBC Radio yesterday, despite a much lower rate of enforcement and sentencing. And our dollar isn't doing too bad lately, either.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Yes, a few hundred years ago they used to hang the hungry peasants for hunting game on the Landlords Estate. That was the LAW, but times have changed and that law no longer applies. And neither does a pile of other crappy laws that created class distinction by giving certain groups of people "SPECIAL RIGHTS".
Patent and copyright laws are no different than the segregation laws that finally got knocked down. It is an anachronism, belongs in another time and place, where the monarchy could control the presses and thus control the dissemination of subversive (to them) ideas.
Everyone who ever wrote a sentence, or came up with an idea, was educated in the school system, and by the society that they live in. And since the actual nature of thought being what it actually is, it needs foundational material on which to build. Ideas are not actually unique they are just recycled and applied in different context. The working concept of a computer existed many years before there was an actual computer. Ever hear of Charles Babbage? Shakespeare or Newton or Angelo are always somewhere in the background. So then where do these special RIGHTS come from????
and by your logic the drinking age should be lower as more people drink under the age of 18/19, speeding should be legal and marijuana should be legal since more people have smoked it.
Exactly. Did you have a point ?
On the other this is a bad precedent, they are essentially saying that "if you can't beat them, ignore them".
Um no. This is fantastic precedent. It is actual democracy. If society overwhelmingly commits an action in defiance of 'the law' then society accepts and approves of that action. What else *should* government do but respect the wishes of the majority of its citizens?
Illegal file-sharing is not proper theft but it is without a doubt a fraud, as you are getting a service (entertainment) without paying for it.
Really? I have MTV, Much Music, Commercial Free Digital Music via my Cable Service, Commercial Free XM Satellite Radio... if its a current Top 40 track I can hear it dozens of times a day, and I *do*. So, if I decide to download that track instead of record it off the radio or TV, what is the real difference? And 90% of the infringing p2p music traffic is top40 crud and fits into the category.
I already have the right to record it myself any number of the dozens of times I hear it per week, but suddenly I'm committing a fraud if I download the track over the internet instead? And storing it on media I paid a music levy on? (And I pay that levy even if I store my own digital photos on the discs instead??)
A personal belief that piracy is okay (and thus not paying for something someone else has created) is the crux of your argument. I disagree with that, I think it is wrong. Given that, every other argument you make is pretty much immaterial.