Copyright Expert Uninvited From Canada Policy Forum

earthforce_1 writes "The vested interests of restrictive copyright are stacking the deck in Canada. The Public Policy Forum Symposium on intellectual property reform has bowed to pressure from certain interests and dis-invited noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf. The forum's stated mandate is '...to strive for excellence in government — to serve as a neutral, independent forum for open dialogue on public policy, and to encourage reform in public sector management.' For some reason, the US Ambassador to Canada and the former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association have been invited — apparently they are perceived to have a more neutral view of what Canadian copyright laws should be? More information at Howard Knopf's blog."

Comments

Re:They have more than they deserve

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, MP McTeague is really nuts (nuts enough that he also wants to make it against the law to criticize the political positions of MPs online). He is completely in the pockets of these corporations. Boing Boing has a great article on this.

This situation actually makes me a little happy. It means that my country wasn't the only one to have its politicians bought by these corporations. But at the same time, this newfound camaraderie in our mutual pwnage by the music and movie companies is quite disturbing. It reminds me of the laws in one of my favorite adventure games, The Longest Journey: corporate Law. Not laws regulating corporations, laws made by corporations regulating people.

Re:They have more than they deserve

[Rary]

The 'copyright industry' is controlled and manipulated by a limited number of players.

Exactly. And its interesting that this coincides so nicely with this story.

Re:no wonder, hes a troll.

[Danse]

People seem to have been brainwashed into believing that copyright is some sort of natural right, even though it's anything but. The only reason it exists is to serve the public interest in having new works created. So temporary, limited monopolies were granted to the creators of the works for a long enough period to give them incentive to create them (originally 14 years, extendable to 28), after which they become part of the public domain. Since then, the copyright industry has grown very large and very powerful. It has used its money to get copyrights extended repeatedly, so that they now last longer than a normal human lifespan, and penalties for violating these laws have become extremely harsh.

Where is the public interest in this? Where is the compromise? It's been destroyed by the money involved. Nobody needs a 90+ year copyright as incentive to write a book or a song, or to create a movie. Nobody. No corporation forecasts earnings anywhere near that long, and therefore wouldn't green-light anything that was going to take more than the tiniest fraction of that time to make its money back. People just haven't been aware of what's going on, but recently we've started feeling some of the pain. I hope it gets painful enough that we see a real backlash against the industry that has done this.