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Canadian Domain Name Registrants To Get More Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the dot-ca
domain, plans to change its WHOIS policy to better protect domain name registrants. Quoting the Canadian Press: '[Law Professor Michael] Geist said the changes have raised the ire of law enforcement and intellectual property lawyers, who have used the Whois search to track down sexual predators and copyright violators.' Despite this, the organization seems committed to following through with the reforms."
Geist also gave a talk recently about digital advocacy; the effectiveness of using modern technology to raise concerns and share ideas about issues such as privacy and copyright law.
Speaking as an owner of many .ca, .com and other domain names, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is by far the most annoying to deal with.
.ca. After buying the domain from a registrar, you are forced to go to CIRA's website, create a second account, and register again. And you're not done yet. They want you to send in a photocopy of your driver's licence. Can you say identity theft?
.ca registrar) recommends - don't bother fixing it since it is such a hassle. Strangely enough, I attended a CIRA meeting where CIRA was complaining about the large number of errors in their registrant database. THERE ARE SO MANY ERRORS BECAUSE IT IS SO DIFFICULT TO FIX THEM!!!
.ca names are far more expensive than .com. CIRA is swimming in cash from their monopoly fees.
With a normal domain name, you go to a registrar, pay your money, and you get your domain.
Not so with
Even worse, what if you need to correct a minor typographical error? You might think you can log in to your CIRA account and fix it. Nooooo. Can you log in to your account with your registrar and fix it? Nooooo. You need to download and fill out the form, sign it, get it witnessed and send it in with photoID. Most people wouldn't bother - in fact, that is exactly what Tucows (a large
Not to mention the fact that
Frankly, CIRA should contract out the whole thing to Godaddy. They would run it far better and cheaper.
From my experience, WHOIS details are mostly used by spammers and scammers.
And spamfighters, since spammers have to have reachable domains for their "customers" to locate them. Even if they disguise them, they still need to have some kind of web presence that the "customers" will find credible, and that provides a hook to locate them.
I buy all my music (and not very much of it) so I don't have to worry about the RIAA. As far as free speech, I think it's sufficient to note that the Supreme Court of Canada has interpreted freedom of speech as subservient to some of the other goals in the Charter of Rights: The effect of this type of material is to reinforce male-female stereotypes to the detriment of both sexes. It attempts to make degradation, humiliation, victimization and violence in human relationships appear normal and acceptable. A society which holds that egalitarianism, non-violence, consensualism, and mutuality are basic to any human interaction, whether sexual or other, is clearly justified in controlling and prohibiting any medium of depiction, description or advocacy which violates these principles (R. v. Butler, 1992] 1 S.C.R. 452, at p. 494, citing the MacGuigan Report of 1978). In Keegstra, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld convictions for similarly vague "hate speech", e.g. ""promoting hatred against an identifiable group". More broadly, a report summarizes it thusly: The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may limit free speech in the name of goals such as ending discrimination, ensuring social harmony, or promoting gender equality. It also has ruled that the benefits of limiting hate speech and promoting equality are sufficient to outweigh the freedom of speech clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the country's bill of rights incorporated in the country's constitution. . .
I should make clear that I regard both Canada and the US as at the forefront of modern liberty and well ahead of the rest of the world in that respect. Disagreements between us are disagreements on common values -- they demonstrate that we are closer than further (in a manner of speaking).
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Butler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Keegstra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Andrews
If the assumption was as you say, then the levy would be the amount of a price of a music CD. As it is, it's a few cents. And it's not on every blank CD - it's on ones marked as for audio. Which means you can just buy stacks of "data" CDs and use them to your hearts content, levyless, to copy audio.
:)
Your argument, that our legal system assumes everyone is "guilty" of piracy, is circular. How can our legal system be assuming you're guilty of violating a law when doing an act the same legal system explicitly permits? It's like saying a tax on gasoline means you're guilty of driving. Dizzying logic, even for an American.
Data CDs also have the levy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
A whois record is proof that the registrar tagged your domain with that particular info. It is not proof of ownership, and they can change the info at whim. There's no bound value.
I'd be fine with Whois offering an email address for domain-related issues, but even better would be to do away with it entirely. Just send your gripes to abuse@ or postmaster@. Whois info has been more often used for bad than good.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The extension to murder implies that copying a music CD is inherently wrong - in the legal world, malum in se. Murder, rape, serious assaults - they cause harm, and are generally agreed to be wrong anywhere you go. I don't think that many people would agree that copying a CD causes direct harm to the copyright holder. If there is any harm at all, it can only be indirect - perhaps due to a loss of revenue. If that revenue loss to the copyright holder is made up by the state by a special tax, wherein is there any harm done at all?
There is actually some convincing evidence that suggests there is no link between music copying and a loss of revenue, even in countries where such copying is illegal and there is no tax. Often such copying is done by people who would never have purchased the "retail" CD anyway, even if they couldn't copy. There is evidence to suggest that copying by those people results in the wider dissemination of music to those who can (and do) then purchase it. If this is indeed the case, then the blank media tax is actually giving the music industry more money than they would have had even if there was no copying done at all.
Whether or not this is the case, the fact is that if someone who would never have purchased a CD copies it, there cannot be said to be any harm done to the copyright holder. The copyright holder has lost nothing. This can only ever be malum prohibitum.
In Canada, rather than empowering our government with more and more draconian measures to stop violations of laws with questionable underpinnings, we simply add a small tax to blank media. This is our way of indicating how much we value music makers, and remunerating them for what they provide us. No DMCA, no court system clogged by the RIAA suing disabled people or single mothers, just a quietly effective system that looks to me to be fair to all.
The sad thing, is that law makers in the United States are putting enormous pressure on our government to adopt a more American system. That would be a tragedy, and I hope that we hold out.
I do apologize for the misinformation about data/audio CDs. I seem to remember this distinction being made at some point, though, so that may be a change in more recent levies. I don't generally use blank CDs much for data nowadays anyway - I use DVD, which has no levy. In fact, I only ever use blank CDs for the occasional audio disc, so the levy works well in my case.
i'm the proud owner of a gaggle of .ca domains, going back to the days when they were administered as a labor of love out of the university of british columbia by one dedicated soul - John Demco. he was rewarded by having abuse heaped on him for being way too particular about whether applicants were stealing trademarks, or were otherwise out to make trouble. unsurprisingly, he was a volunteer working under the de facto authority of Jon Postel.
many Canadians, esp those in business, wanted a system more like .com, so anybody could get registered in 2 minutes flat - a great system until we had to endure years of cybersquatting, reverse-cybersquatting and the like. when CIRA took over 8 years ago, they had far more resources to throw at the .ca domain, yet have built a system very much in the spirit of the old one - fair, secure and extremely well administered. the decision to pull .ca data out of whois is just another step along that path.
why anybody is surprised or upset by this decision is a mystery to me. law enforcement officials everywhere will always be disappointed if they're not allowed to stick a probe up your ass to see what you've had for lunch. as for privacy on the Internet, it's long gone - in so many ways it's hard to count 'em.
if "officials" are pissed about CIRA, it ain't because they're pulling whois out from under them. it's because CIRA operates at arm's length from the government, which is a lot more than you say for ICANN and the Dept of Commerce.