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.'"

Comments

Re:News Flash from our cute neighbors to the north

[Watson Ladd]

The US would have little choice. The UK has nukes and subs, and protects Canada.

Re:Ambivalent feelings

[noidentity]

On the other this is a bad precedent, they are essentially saying that "if you can't beat them, ignore them". 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.

Maybe the government is realizing that copyright law is outdated? It's not a fundamental right of human beings, just a tool that was used in the past to jump-start the publishing industry. How about a new model that doesn't require any enforcement, where people fully pay for the labor used to create the product, then it becomes freely available?

(from the article) 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'

Maybe if we embraced the fact that copying was essentially free, we might find an even better business model which created more wealth.

Re:Not possible.

[CastrTroy]

I think I heard it best on the CBC Podcast of Search Engine. Basically, what he said, is that computers are machines that copy information. When they are working properly, they copy information really quickly, and really accurately. Trying to stop a computer from copying information is like trying to stop gravity.

Re:Unfortunately

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Provincial enforcement of federal statutes? Because that's what copyright is, in Canada.

Copyright is a federal statute in Canada, which means that provincial legislatures don't have the power to change that statute. It doesn't affect the police; the Criminal Code is also a federal statute, and yet provincial and municipal police investigate murders (indictable offences) and shoplifting (summary offences) all the time.

Generally, a police officer with jurisdiction in some area of Canada can exercise his powers to enforce any law that governs that area. Of course, the Calgary city police generally aren't going to allocate their resources to investigating crime in Edmonton, for example, but if they do, it might even be considered wilful obstruction of a peace officer for the Edmonton police to interfere.