Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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]
It's a good thing that we have sceptics, on climate change, copyright, or any other debate that isn't about absolute facts for that matter. If we ever reach the point where some prevailing consensus is considered the gospel truth because it suddenly became trendy/lobbyist fodder/a source of research funding, then we're in a lot of trouble. One of my favourite quotations comes from the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
In this case, I have little doubt now that the effects described by the pro-climate change scientists are real. However, I also have little doubt that some of the arguments made in An Inconvenient Truth were naive at best, as evidenced by the rush to invent credible explanations after criticism in the "inconvenient documentary" that followed, nor that concerns about imminent catastrophic results have been overstated in the rush to be seen to be doing something. There's some truth in there somewhere, and it's for the best that we have at least some people advocating both sides of the debate to help us find it.
Getting back on topic, I think much the same is true of an ethical/political/economic issue like copyright. It's easy on Slashdot, ancestral home of "information wants to be free" groupthink and student economics, to find ways to criticise copyright and claim it reaches too far. It's just as easy, if you work as a professional recording artist, to find an ethical argument that the world doesn't need your particular interpretation of a work for free and that copyright in that recording should last for your entire lifetime. Again, a balance needs to be struck, starting with deciding what copyright is really for (which has multiple sensible answers, not all of which are based on some vague wording in the constitution of one nation, and which are sometimes incompatible).
This is why it is a shame that we are reading this story today. It's not even necessary that the person who's been removed might have argued the way many on Slashdot would like to see the debate go. It is a shame merely because the debate will now be less balanced than it otherwise would have been.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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