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Canada's New DMCA Considered Worst Copyright Law
loconet writes "The government of Canada is preparing to attempt to bring a new DMCA-modeled copyright law in Canada in order to comply with the WIPO treaties the country signed in 1997. (These treaties were also the base of the American DMCA.) The new Canadian law will be even more restrictive in nature than the American version and worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60. Among the many restrictive clauses in this new law, as Michael Geist explains, is the total abolishment of the concept of fair use: 'No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.' Geist provides a list of 30 things that can be done to address the issues."
This is hardly surprising. The current Canadian government is more interested in mirroring American political issues than doing the bidding of it's own people.
Most of us here are embarrassed. Sorry, we'll vote better next time.
Geist's list of 30 things you can do, linked to in TFS, is pretty good, actually, no matter where you live. Even if your country already has a DMCA-like law, you can still fight for it or certain provisions of it to be repealed. Just replace the Canadian-sepcific info with the equivalents in your country.
Furthermore, some of it just plain good advice -- only buy DRM-free music and videos, release stuff under the Creative Commons licenses. And so forth.
Most of you are gonna be like, yeah, yeah, but no one cares. That's not true anymore. Now that the MAFIAA have become a nuisance and even public enemy #1 as far as some are concerned, the public will push for change. Like it or not, most politicians eventually cave to public opinion. After all, they need the public's support in order to get elected.
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This is a non-issue. The bill will never pass.
The US complains about Canada's IP laws all the time. So every so often we introduce a new bill so we can point and say "see US, we're trying!". However the bill is purposely written to be so restrictive as to never, ever make it through 3 readings in the House of Commons. A bit wasteful, sure, but for the most part it keeps the americans off our backs.