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Canadian Groups Call For Massive Net Regulation
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist is reporting that Canadian cultural groups including ACTRA and SOCAN have called on Canada's telecom regulator to implement a massive new Internet regulation framework. This includes a new three-percent tax on ISPs to pay for new media creation, Canadian content requirements for commercial websites, and licensing requirements for new media broadcasters, including for user-generated content."
Well, it's like the tax on CD-Rs, isn't it? Clearly, they're just adjusting to the increased bandwidth and HDD space to legalize copying and sharing music and movies.
Er... right?
It will be disguised as "net neutrality".
\u262D = \u5350
How many copyright porn movies/images get copied over the internet.
How much of this money would be funneled directly to the porn industry compared to other copying.
Make that number public it will quickly be pushed under the table.
The Prime Minister decided to try and pass a budget that would cut funding to opposition parties and make sure that civil servants couldn't go on strike. This was met with a lot of yelling and wining. So the opposition parties(which consist of the majority of members of ailment) decided to get together and form a coalition government. The Prime Minister freaked out and asked the Governor General for a time out of ailment(prorogue), until after the new year. This basically makes it so that the opposition parties can't have a confidence vote and try and form a new government with them in power, or have a new election. This was given to the Prime Minister, now ailment is stuck only able to do everyday tasks and not do things like pass new laws and bills and crap.
It's all a big freaking gong show, so nothing will pass until the new year, and even then they will probably be focusing on each other and crying about how they got kicked out of the sandbox. Once that's done they will probably work on pushing the budget through(if we don't have a new election) which will consist of incessant debate over bailouts and more wining about what happened last week.
That's the political situation in a nut shell.
Canadian content requirements for commercial websites? What, so walmart.ca would have to sell at least 80% hoser merchandise? The Globe and Mail website would have to feature at least 75% Canadian news even if nothing happened in the Great White North that day?
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
witness my band. we suck. people hate us. no one comes to our shows. so, we release a cd. since we're not big enough to be granted an exemption, we pay the cd-r tax on all the blanks we use (and, yes, we used a legit duplication plant). of course, our cd sells miserably and we get nowhere near the beak-even point.
which means.... we lose $300 putting out our cd, and the tax we paid on the blanks goes straight into the pockets of a big-name canadian act. perhaps avril levign. that's right: levign makes more money off my artistic creation than i do.
thank you socan!
2 1337 4 u!
Canada has a proud heritage of this. One province forced the entire country to have to be effectively bilingual. Then when that province wanted to secede, the First Nations who owned the land that 2/3 of their hydroelectric power came from, regardless of actual population numbers, refused to go along, and stopped it cold. So I've no doubt this could actually go into practice in the Great White. I also have no doubt that nobody can require an artist to conduct their business from any given country without forceably restraining them. Canadian artists will simply produce elsewhere, leaving the ISPs to fork over 3% of what Serenity's staff theoretical mathematician Jayne Cobb described as "let's see, nuthin', plus nuthin', carry the nuthin'..."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I honestly don't understand why the music industry gets to tax Canadians as a whole for the behavior of a few. Why do media sources get different treatment than the other industries? Shouldn't canadians be paying a Photoshop tax at this point?
More to the point, why should they get to collect a toll off the internet but not me? I didn't make any music that is getting pirated by a few individuals, and neither did these guys.
Not that I necessarily agree with him (or don't), but I think his point was something along the lines of Radio being a somewhat localized medium, requiring a certain amount of local content makes it easier for local performers to get exposure. The internet on the other hand, being massively non-localized and more or less free to everyone, it makes no sense and serves no purpose to require "local" websites to carry a certain percentage of local content, as the location of the servers hosting a website makes no difference to the content of that website, nor where it can be accessed from (barring local regulations, censorship, or routing issues).
The worlds copyright and patent systems are in need of massive reform, as they don't seem to be living up to the ideals they promised (namely providing incentive for the production of new works). Rather in most cases modern copyright and patent seems to function primarily as a crutch to prop up record companies (as opposed to artists), and as a stick that corporations can beat each other with. Does copyright and patent have some good ideas and good uses? Yes, but nowhere near as many as the abuses it seems to be put to lately.
Unfortunately I don't have a better system to propose, nor even a set of suggestions on how the current one can be fixed, other than perhaps by reducing the span of copyright to something like say 10 years, and putting more stringent requirements on the issuing of patents. What I do know is that the current system doesn't seem to cut it, and hopefully we can come up with something better.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Strangely, I'm finding this to be the most enjoyable period of time politically here for the last 2 years. It's so quiet and peacefully and no new stupid legislation! Dare I say it? I want it to last longer!!
Oddly enough, I feel the same way... I'm of the opinion that the more time they spend bickering, the less damage they do.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
While some canadians tell me that they believe people that this dude thinks that he is this dude, I completely disagree, however I think that
this guy believes himself to be this guy.
This asshole really wants to be this asshole
This goof is really this goof.
You can't handle the truth.
I for one want the conservatives turfed. It's not okay to try to turn our country into a one-party state, and I don't care that he "took it back". Harper can no longer be trusted with power. He has to go.
This so fucking much. You have no choice. You pay it, or you don't rent the hall. Period. No music being played at all? Tough. Your own original music? Tough. It's infuriating.
This is exactly what I've been arguing since they made this idea public: How does the money get spread? Who does it go to? The labels? The artists? Is it strictly on radio play and the charts? Or does the number of times a song gets downloaded come into play? How the fuck are they going to make this fair at all??! And how do they plan on monitoring this without blatantly spying on everyone using the Internet? And if it comes down to the number of times a song is downloaded, what stops someone from fraudulently making their song get downloaded more? I'd like to see how the CD-R media tax gets paid out currently ... it's probably a total joke.
This is just some half-baked plan that won't work.
The copyright 'system' should probably get scrapped and a new set of copyright laws and rights should be introduced, one that makes sense with the 'Information Age' - fuck I hate that term.
Would people apply for a cut of the cash? What if a band doesn't release CDs, but people post recordings of their shows online - do they get a cut? Is registration with either of these agencies required to get a cut?
This is obviously the idea of people who HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE ON HOW THE INTERNET WORKS.
There's only one way around this whole problem - setup a massive website, that's not run by either of these agencies, but reports to them, and the government, that hosts all the music, and basically lets Canadians download for free from it. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose of taxing the ISP, as people should just be expected to pay for the content when they download it from said massive music website. So if they go with this idea, this way - statistics on listeners, viewership, can be gathered, the taxes on the ISPs can then go towards content in a 'fair' way - but how's this fair to all the people who don't download music, movies or any media?
Maybe the telecommunications providers should just focus on providing bandwidth, and pool their resources into a common media database. Then prices and payouts can be fairly distributed by on-demand content. That's probably the ideal outcome ... this way bandwidth costs by the ISPs can be lowered as they could just have a direct link into the database, or host it themselves, and basically make programs like Bittorrent pointless for Canadian content.
Having this run by a government organization is just asking for disgusting amounts of waste, but having a single private organization implies a monopoly ... the alternative could be a single very public organization, that basically shares all it's meeting information, allows the public to be involved, open forums, anonymous posting ability, details the operating costs, basically leave themselves open to insane amounts of criticism, and character attacks on the people operating it.
If that was to happen, you can count on a copyright war between countries then ... as Canada would have protected it's own media interests, but not any other nation's ... then again, it's not like anyone else gives a fuck about us anyway. Too bad we signed onto things like the WIPO.
Plus I think SOCAN is absolutely insane. 51% Canadian media content for all Canadian commercial websites!? What if the content provided by Canadians just can't keep up with that from the rest of the world? They're basically going to destroy commercial media enterprises by trying to get shit like that passed ... Canadians will just go elsewhere online and find the content they want, view the ads those people provide, make other people in other countries money...
If they want Canadian media to remain competitive online, is make the massive database, and tax the ISPs... they'll just put the costs on the consumers anyway - so they might as well just make it a services tax directly to the consumer. Cable companies should probably be evolving their TV services anyway, and could offer TVoIP where customers subscribe to custom media playlists offered by a variety of people through the super-massive-media-database.
What's the name of your band? Lord of the Onion Rings?