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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."
They know that they have more 'rights' in their copyrights than they deserve. They've spent a lot of money to make it that way. They know that if things were rendered "fair and balanced" that they'd lose a LOT of money -- not just the money they spent buying laws that favor them, but undeserved income these laws yield.
I can't hold these jackasses completely responsible for their greed. We've all got some greed in us and corruption is a problem of opportunity, not of character. I blame the legislators that make themselves available to the highest bidder and the character flaws that prevent them from correcting the circumstances that enable corruption.
It's pretty simple if you have a good agenda to keep, make sure you don't invite people who oppose said agenda.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
i have to say, i do support the levy, because it means i can download all i want and never get sued.
but here is the part where the levy is a miserable failure:
independent bands.
many of my friends are in unsigned bands, playing bar shows on a regular basis, and they are actually making a living off of it. not a good living by any means, they are just scraping by, but they are doing it on their own.
But...lets say they want to burn some of their songs and sell them at their shows. every black CD has that nice levy on it, they pay it, but because they are unsigned, they get nothing back for it.
IF any of the money does make it past the labels and into the artists hands, it's going to acts like nickleback.
thats right, supporting independent music helps the big guys, too.
thank you, blank media levy!
-I only code in BASIC.-
He was merely doing the opposite of what the PPF did, stacking the deck to get answers they wanted. He merely rephrased their questions to get the opposite answer. As a Canadian I'm rather disgusted in this. Luckily I'm in a Conservative riding, and can easily change my vote if they ever try anything stupid.
...It's like you never read parent's comment at all.
Wow, I applaud you. Everybody on Slashdot has already stopped doing the unnecessary task of RTFAing*, but you, young man, you're ahead of the times. You don't even RTFC! You, sir, will set the standards for the hive-mind in the years to come!
(* Or is it R'ingTFA?)
Have you stopped beating your wife: [ ] yes I have stopped [ ] no I still beat her. So how do you answer if you've never beaten her?
All I can see here is that he tried to answer a broken set of questions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
First Question: Well considering that the record companies were trying to get a jury to basically charge someone $150,000 per copyright violation on 24 songs. it does not seem too unreasonable to pose this question in the blog. That question is DIRECTLY based off the crap that the RIAA have pulled and if you think the Canadian version of the RIAA is any better you got another thing coming. They wanted the Levy on blank media but now they realize that by doing that they shot themselves in the foot and want to keep it and get more punishment for copyright infringers *OR* get rid of it so they can make it more draconian and compatible with the US version of the DMCA/Copyright Acts. Remember that all those 'settlements' they've been offering college students have been approximately $2000-3000 hit on their pocket books. It is not out of the realm of possibility that they would ask for a $5000 'settlement' which is a fancy name for 'extortion fee'
Second Question: See first question + All the Slashdot stories about John Does being sued as a collective to get the names then breaking the cases up and suing them all individually or offering the 'extortion package'
Third Question: Basically a plain jane DRM question. Nothing controversial here. The question he's trying to ask is do you buy the physical media (in which case its subject to first sale doctrine) or do you buy 'listening rights' which means you should be able to transfer your purchase between different media and different devices you own.
Maybe there is a bit of vitrol in there, but it is ALL based on facts that have already happened in the US. If it can happen in the US it can happen in Canada too. Its our job as Canadians to keep ourselfs The true north strong and free instead of reversing that position like the US did with the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave when they kept bending over in the name of terrorism. The RIAA is effectively committing domestic terrorism, you cant goto a college without worrying you're gonna be targeted for 'extortion fees' infact you probably have to budget for it at the rate they're suing people.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Here's a little advice for you and your friends
The blank media levy does *NOT* apply to the importers. If your friends are able to purchase blank CD's from outside of the country in bulk (like 1000's) then the levy does not apply to them since they are the importers. Also recording onto the blank media and then selling it ensures that the purchaser does not have to pay the blank media levy as well thereby bypassing the entire corrupt blank media levy system.
Seriously, tell your friends about this. It should help them.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
And thus you fall into the trap of assuming that because a noted expert's objective and factually defensible opinion favours one side of an issue, he must therefore have a "side" and be excluded in the interest of "balance". It is precisely this kind of muddled and uncritical thought that leads to gross errors in law and policy.
Should child molesters be given a place in the debate about whether more stringent laws against kiddie porn are a good idea? How far should we go in a specious attempt to defend the indefensible?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Maybe a country that is based on equality of opportunity (Canada / USA) should put less focus on crafting incentives that involve passing family fortunes down.
- John
"Its the reason people believe that 100 years of industrial evolution on this planet can corrupt over 4.5 billion years of naturally occuring weather cycles."
No, robust science is the reason I (and I dare say most people here) accept the message that has come from the IPCC and every other national science body on the planet.
It is intellectually lazy (at best cynical) to disagree with something just because some random lobbyist uses it to push an agenda. The problem with "for hire" lobbyists is they are members of the old boys club, expert liars, and schooled in the art of manipulation, they belive what they are paid to belive. If anything lobbyists (and in many cases politicians) have tried to hide and discredit the science in exactly the same way tobbaco lobbyists did in the 80's.
In fact if you look up one Fred Singer you will find a "fossil fuel lobbyists" and a "tobacco lobbyists" all wrapped up into one person, decorated with ancient qualifications and honarary degrees. Until the last couple of years Fred and other like-minded lobbyists had been very successfully spreading mis-information that is then repeated ad-nauseum on slashdot by geeks who often have sufficient education in physics and chemistry to know better. I also belive much of that derision on slashdot was due to the messenger, ie: people heard the IPPC's message coming out of Al Gore's mouth and instinctively started taking pot shots at what they percieved to be "Al Gore's crackpot theory".
However in the interests of "fair and balanced", I will point out there are still a tiny minority of scientists who disagree with some parts of the IPCC consensus, here is a list of them. You will find that their arguments have been debunked many times over, a good place to start looking for such mythbusting and the shenanigans of anti-science lobbyists is here
If you don't want to go through the pain of educating yourself on the science and politics of climate change then I have one simple question that may clear things up for you. Since CO2 is known to trap heat and we are pumping 10Gt/yr of it into the atmosphere, how is that trapped heat disipated back into space, or alternatively what absorbs the excess CO2 so that it unable to trap heat in the first place?
BTW: Please don't take the above as a personal attack, your only human and we are all vunerable to well crafted bullshit from outside our sphere of expertise (which incidently is the reason why the scientific method is considered usefull).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
As it has been for at least 800 years, starting with the Guelphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guelphs_and_Ghibellines) if not before.
other side wanted more balance
I agree, it should be more balanced.
We live in a democracy; one person, one vote.
Copyright affects everybody. The population of Canada is 33 million. The industry is only a tiny fraction of the total population. A representative panel should have maybe ten representatives from the general population for every one industry representative.
Note: Industry representatives should get no special treatment simply because they're rich or because they might be excessively affected by changes in copyright law; companies are just groups of people and should have no special privileges compared to the general population.
Yes, it's tyranny of the majority. Problem is, the only thing worse than that is tyranny of a minority.
---
Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
...and during those 100 years we have dug up and burned a significant proportion of the fossil fuel deposits that originally built up over a ~ 100 million year period ~ 300 million years in the past (ballpark figures) - when the climate was considerably different to today. That's a geological-scale intervention - you have to be pretty blinkered to deny even the possibility that it could have geological-scale consequences.
And no, that's not intended to be an evidence-backed scientific argument - just a plausibility argument, responding in kind to the parent's (im)plausibility argument.
PS: the state of the climate isn't caused by either CO2 or the Sun or algae in the sea or continental drift - its caused by all those factors and many more interacting in a complex and poorly understood equlibrium - changing any of those factors can shift the equilibrium, and in some types of equilibrium changing the wrong factor by just a little bit too much can destroy that equilibrium.
The human race is now so large and has such power to change the environment that we need to stop assuming that our activities are insignificant until proven otherwise. Trees affect the climate (you think that's air your breathing? its tree fart!) and they just sit there doing nothing.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Yes, Knopf likes classical music and doesn't like pop, but that's a side issue. He mentions it on his blog, but it has nothing to do with the main issues he discusses concerning copyright. As far as copyright goes, he isn't extreme at all. He doesn't propose abolition of copyright or anything really radical. Much of what he does is just point out the facts. The talk that he was going to give is on the same topic as a recent post in which he pointed out various ways in which Canadian copyright law is actually stronger than US copyright law, contrary to the US propaganda. I've seen no substantive response to his points. Indeed, the highly respected Michael Geist recently pointed out that according to the far from radical World Economic Forum, Canada ranks well above the US in its adherence to and enforcement of copyright norms.
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.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer