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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."
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.
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!
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.
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.