Slashdot Mirror
Canadians Battling Proposed Canadian DMCA
An anonymous reader writes "CTV reports on how Canadians are fighting back against the Canadian DMCA. Led by Michael Geist, the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group is nearing 90,000 members. There are local chapters, a YouTube contest, wikis, and people writing letters and organizing rallies against the copyright bill. Geist said, 'When you get tens of thousands of Canadians speaking out like this, there's big political risk for any political party who chooses to ignore it.'"
Prentice and the Tories don't need to worry about voters. I'm sure they've been paid handsomely by American media giants for their co-operation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Does anyone know who in the US elected government caused the US DMCA to happen?
So, if even slashdot users can't remember who caused the original DMCA to happen, what hope is there that any Canadian politicians would be worried?
Have we really entered an age where the number of people who join facebook groups are used as some kind of measure?
Half the people I know on facebook join whatever the hell their friends join, or click anything they can to get the alerts to go away.
Seriously - really?
The government will just ignore them and do what they want, as the people are too stupid to know what is right.
( yes thats sarcasm, but its also what the 'man' will do if given a chance )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Despite the conspiracy theories you're likely to hear about this, the reason why the DMCA sailed through Congress is the same reason it'll sail through Canada's legislative process... media companies are responsible for a nice chunk of GNP (and whatever they call it in Canada), and neither side, liberal or conservative, is willing give up that wealth. And both sides believe that things like high technology for consumers and piracy is a danger to their broadcasters and publishers.
The reason opponents are going to lose on this is that all major parties will be on board with the copyright holders. And average voters don't give a rat's ass about copyright reform crusades.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Michael Geist is a shining example of why academics are critically important in society - and why governments detest them. His running analysis of bill C-61 has been eloquent, straightforward and polite. He has earned a loyal following be clearly explaining what the flaws of the legislation are and how they will impact Canadians in everyday use (for example, how the Government is touting the clauses that grant timeshifting and device shifting rights while glossing over the fact that other parts of the legislation effectively neuter consumer rights where DRM is involved).
Dr. Geist's blog posts and editorials in several major Canadian newspapers encouraged me to write to several members of parliament after a lifetime of political apathy. More importantly, I've done my best to explain the legislation's flaws to others, too, in the hope that they will take action. Several have, also for the first time.
I've written a couple of emails and talked to his office manager about the issue and asked why the Liberal party is not making this a confidence motion. It's bad legislation and bad for the country.
For anybody else in Etobicoke-Lakeshore (Toronto South-West), please drop a line to Michael Ignatieff and let him know what you think.
Thanx,
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It was already on one page, karma whore.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I think he means educated and informed about the issues they're voting for, not IQ or whether they're 'school' educated.
If Canadian politicians don't respond to the wishes of their constituents, they have the option of replacing them. The current ruling party, for example, is only about 20 years old.
It's not comparable to the US system where Democrats have a monopoly on the left and Republicans on the right.
It just struck me, reading this thread, how really fucked up the implied procedure at work here is.
We have a bill, moving forward, over which the citizenry seems to be divided between those opposed and those apathetic. And, nevertheless, the bill has a credible shot at passing, and this is treated as a fairly unremarkable occurrence. The fact that legislation can happen, in absence of popular support, unless some(large) quantity of displeasure materializes, is a seriously broken imitation of representative government.
It shouldn't take mass protest to kill legislation that has near zero popular support, it should simply die as a matter of course. How did we come to accept a situation where that isn't the case?
Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, who serves as the party's deputy house leader, has been sending the following letter to concerned constituents about Bill C-61. The letter, which is the most substantive that I have seen, is posted in its entirety with permission.
Thank you for your letter concerning Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act. Over the last few months I have made a concerted effort to better inform myself of all of the issues associated with copyright reform in Canada. In this vein, I joined the Intellectual Property (IP), Anti-Counterfeiting and Anti-Piracy Parliamentary Caucus. Through the meetings and consultations held by this group I came to the conclusion that reform of our copyright legislation will, I hope, have the following principles at its core:
1) Anti-circumvention measures and penalties must be linked to the efforts of those who violate copyright for commercial purposes, and not just the technology itself;
2) Provisions for flexible fair dealing. Fair dealing creates a limited number of exceptions, including private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting to charges of infringement.
3) It would also incorporate a fair and well defined 'notice and notice' system, which involves a notification from a copyright holder - often involving movies, software or music - claiming that a subscriber has made available or downloaded content without authorization on file sharing systems. The Internet Service Provider forwards the notification to the subscriber but takes no other action - it does not pass along the subscriber's personal information, remove the content from its system, or cancel the subscriber's service. It falls to the subscriber to remove the infringing content (if indeed it is infringing) voluntarily.
In assessing the degree to which Bill C-61 incorporated these basic principles, I compared it with the previous Liberal government's proposed copyright Bill - Bill C-60 - which was introduced in June of 2005. Bill C-61 incorporates the same 'notice and notice' requirements as Bill C-60.
Though C-61 appears to offer more flexibility on fair dealing, in banning circumvention technology the means to legitimately copy or change formats is torn from the hands of legitimate users. Thus, the section of the bill banning legitimate anti-circumvention technology needs to be eliminated and replaced with something that experts in the field would feel is more appropriate in allowing a greater deal of flexibility in fair dealing. I hope that these changes will be developed during the committee's study of the bill.
In Bill C-60 (clause 27, new subsection 34.02(1)) anti-circumvention penalties required that circumvention be for the commercial purpose of infringing copyright, for example reproduction or communication of the work, whereas Bill C-61 (clause 31-new subsection 41.1(1)) prohibits circumvention in general and does not require infringement of an economic right in the work (thus circumvention alone is deemed an infringement). The bill prohibits picking the digital locks (often referred to as circumventing technological protection measures) that frequently accompany consumer products such as CDs, DVDs, and electronic books. Under the new bill, transferring music from a copy-protected CD to an iPod could violate the law. So too could efforts to play a region-coded DVD from a non-Canadian region.
Even the few exceptions to anti-circumvention measures in the bill are deceptive since the software programs needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect privacy or engage in research are prohibited. This is a part of the bill I hope will be amended when the bill gets to committee so that only deliberate infringement of commercial copyright is punished, not the possession of the technology to do so.
As you can see, this is a highly technical piece of legislation, and I will have to study it more closely. While it is my hope that the Conservatives will send this bill to committee for further study and changes b
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!