Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Labour Congress Considers Reversal On IP Policy
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Labour Congress is considering a dramatic reversal of its stance on copyright and IP policy. CLC is comparable to the US AFL-CIO, but Canada is over 30% unionized. The campaign 'we must change copyright and IP law to fight evil counterfeiters and copyright pirates' is actually succeeding in Canada. Quoting the CLC's new policy resolution: '... this critical issue requires a far-reaching response involving legislative and regulatory reform, policy change, and allocation of proper resources to combat the problems. The Canadian government must be given the structure and resources to mount a sustained attack on this pervasive problem, both within Canada and internationally. The criminal and civil laws in Canada must provide adequate deterrence. And consumers must be educated that counterfeiting and piracy are not victimless, nuisance crimes, but instead strike at the heart of our long term economic security.'"
What is strangest is that Michael Geist seems to have waited 2 years to comment on this...
Business unions are sellouts. We need democratic industrial unions.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Its good to see them backing sensible reforms to end needless piracy by shortening the copyright term to 18 years with a single 18 year extension while also reforming patent laws to outlaw software and buisiness model patents and change the review process for normal patents to make it easier for 3rd parties to file prior art.
Oh wait a minute, I think when they said "reform" they meant to say "ruin."
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
I'm running out of places to move to.
Anybody want to take over a small island with me, in the interests of (intellectual) freedom? Seriously, I feel as though the realm of ideas is my favourite playground, and with each extension & perversion of copyright law another bully shows up. Today I can't use the slide. Tomorrow, the swings. Content should be created to be used, not merely sold like some cheap toy. /bitter
The latest in a string of bad lawmaking in an attempt to solve the piracy problem with a bad solution.
Let's just take a step back and look at the big picture for a moment. Piracy is only a problem because some (not all!) information and media businesses depend on a consumer cost downloads business model, which is marginalized by mass consumer circumvention of piracy.
Our collective response (or rather the collective response of our lawmakers) has been to increase penalties and (attempt to) increase control and regulation of the internet. This, however, always fails to achieve the desired effect. The endgame to this trend is complete and total regulation of the internet.
What does that mean? The only way to logistically enforce noncommercial copyright infringement committed by ordinary internet users is to monitor absolutely everything and cripple everyone's ability to make encrypted transmissions. The very openness of the internet has to be totally and utterly obliterated before true enforcement of antipiracy laws can occur.
I submit that since this is an unattainable goal, that we should just say screw is and legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. An unenforceable law doesn't belong on the books. As soon as lawmakers and our economy stop subsidizing clearly obsolete business models, then we can truly move on and realize the full potential of what the internet offers our society: limitless copying of information at negligible costs to everyone. A truly amazing ability.
The only alternative is to destroy the openness of the internet, which won't happen, or the slow, painful, inevitable market failure of businesses which depend on consumer cost downloads. For better or worse, they'll die at the hands of piracy if they don't find a business model that's actually enforceable.
And for those of you who might counter with an argument about how prices are decided by what the market is willing to pay, I respectfully ask you to again look at the bigger picture. What the market is willing top pay is fluid and is on a downward trend. The mp3 is 99 cents now. In ten years it may be 50 cents. In twenty it may be 10 cents. In thirty it may be less than ten cents. In forty it may be fractions of a cent. In fifty it may be free.
Actual time lines may very, but the end will be the same, a race to the bottom. If consumers don't get what they want from the market, they will resort to piracy. Businesses impacted today and in the future will either have to adapt or die. Draconian laws will not save them, nor will misguided moralizing. It's not our moral responsibility to subsidize their obsolescence, nor is it our duty to invent replacement business models for them.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Why?
Give us reasons, not rhetoric.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
If someone voluntarily showed up and changed your oil, unasked, they would be out of line to demand payment.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is a difference between such nonsense gaining traction in Canada and a couple business people in power. A BIG difference.
The problem with these copyright czars in Canada, is that they are clearly only here to protect the bigwig American content providers. How is this causing a $22b loss for Canada? There isn't enough Canadian Content (CANCON) to be pirated to cause $22b in damages.
Maybe if they advocated the piracy of content from the US, it would balance out our exchange rate again.
If I commissioned a symphony from a guy, he went off and spent 6 months writing it, and then I refused to pay him, sure, he'd have a legitimate beef, and that would be analogous to "hiring" someone to come clean your place and then failing to pay him.
But if some guy goes off, entirely unasked, and writes some music, I don't see why he has the right to expect any money in return. Maybe people will buy something from him anyway, or donate money in appreciation of his art, but it's not as if they hired him for a job that he did; he just went off and did some job, which yes may have been difficult, without anyone requesting him to.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Counterfeiting is actually quite rare. It's difficult, costly, and dangerous. The vast majority of that crap occurs at swapmeets and shady street vendors. It makes up a very very small percentage of copyright infringement. It's also the easiest to stop, in Canada or the U.S at least. Forget about it in China, or some other country. Rule of thumb, is that once your copyrighted works leave the country, they are no longer your copyrighted works. Good luck with China and a myriad of other countries.
Piracy is far more prolific, since the supply is easier to attain. Just go to any number of public or private torrent trackers and you have huge amounts of content to infringe upon its copyrights.
Striking at the heart of the long term economic security of Canada or any other country? Pure, Unadulterated, and Absolute Fucking Nonsense.
Every Specific Action of Copyright Infringement != Loss of Sale
If the average person has 10 pieces of gold total to spend 1 piece of gold each on copyrighted works and instead pirates 1,000 different copyrighted works, you cannot say that the market lost 1,000 pieces of gold. That's just common sense.
If an entire country's "heart" of its economy is sales of copyrighted works, ITS FUCKED. It can never get above the 10 pieces of gold each in the first place, all the while pushing inaccurate data about losses that are at least 10 times the total amount of possible revenue.
Counterfeiting and Piracy are the smallest and most insignificant impact on the economy. What is dying is an outdated business model that cannot adapt to changes in society.
Trying to turn it into some national security issue is just a farce.
but Canada is over 30% unionized
Undoubtedly the work of a crack commando unit of chemists
Is that union-ized or un-ionized?
The only thing Colgate has the right to, imo, is the physical product in their warehouses. I cannot go steal it, because then they would no longer have it. Similarly, IKEA has a right to keep its shelves, and I can't go take them. But if I can get an IKEA-lookalike shelf without buying one from IKEA (say, I buy some plywood and recreate their design), they don't really have a right to stop me. Artists also have the right to all property they own; I cannot go steal their LPs, or their couches, or their tour bus. However, they don't have some abstract "property" right inhering in all copies of items.
Of course, they can keep their music private if they don't want anyone to have it. If they only want some people to have it, they can give it to those people under a non-disclosure clause, and sue them if they disclose it to other people.
This is entirely unrelated to the inane lawn-mowing example. If you could ask me to mow your lawn and your lawn would get mowed without me showing up at your house or doing any additional work, of course that would be no imposition on me. The only thing wrong with asking me to mow your lawn unpaid is that it would force me to come over to your house and mow your lawn. Since me getting an artist's music for free does not require them to come over to my house and record a new copy of it, it's not a similar imposition on their time.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Perhaps attainable, actually. A full lockdown would be possible if it were made law and enforced at the source.
If USA says that all users must subscribe to the internet from the USA, and also stipulate that all ISP must follow the strict guidelines applied, then you have an enforced internet.
People won't tolerate that, however. They will bypass it.
The goal of a regulated internet is attainable, yet not with the desired results. The effect would be devastating. The real thrust argument that we should simply not waste our money regulating the internet. As soon as the internet becomes regulated, pirate internets will spring up and circumvent the internet or bypass security measures. People would go to jail for helping that happen, but it would still happen. We would wash away a ton of money trying to fix a leaky dam.
Wireless technology is continually improving to the point that some day we will be able to have a full internet experience without every having anything connected via wires. It would be possible for pockets of subversive internets to piggyback the signal and thrive for quite some time.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If I was a Canadian, I'd be pretty pissed.
expandfairuse.org
It is not the state's place to try to protect *ANY* person's business.
When arguments go too far. Next up, business owner robs competitor, says arrest amounts to encouraging monopolies.
and we as the people who it was supposed to serve now need to take back what is ours.
That explains the Ace of Base tracklist. You didn't listen to it though... right?
should be shortened. we generic drug industry (also xerox) shows what happens when you open things up.
besides, it's MY cd now and I can do what i want with it..
NOT theirs.
pat
packrat ; writer-informer. http://packrat.comicgenesis.com http://www.youtube.com/area163 https://www.smashwords.com/
In my case it's difficult to estimate, but it has never been above a few percent and I'm 52 years old. When I was young, we mostly listened to the radio, recorded a few songs on tape, and not very often bought a record.
These days, the radio is mostly shit, a consequence of a monopoly owning the radio stations, but we have the internet to get music without paying directly for it.
Not stealing, I've never stolen anybody's music, I have higher moral standards than some people who sell music.
That "enforcement getting serious" is just the media industry bosses realizing they fucked up, but not admitting it. They had a business model based on getting a very small return per item where the production of each item had a very small cost. When they tried to raise the return per item the market said "NO". That's how capitalism works.
You are contributing to improve the market, not damaging it.
When the Gimp developers notice that many people prefer to copy Photoshop illegally instead of using Gimp legally and free, they will take a closer look at what Photoshop has that Gimp lacks. They will try to add equivalent or better features to Gimp. In the end, the Gimp users, even those that never used Photoshop, will get a better product.
Of course, many free-software developers add features based on their own needs, but still there's a lot of ego among them. They like to know people prefer their products over the competition, free or commercial.
You can be quite sure that there are people right now working on adding features to free software motivated by competition from commercial software, even if they get no pay for increasing their market share.
I mean can this one be won? IPs, laptop check, looking for CDs in hand baggage? And what about flash drives with the size of a penny and a capacity of 100 GB? HD of 1TB? And it's only a modest beginning.
Every time someone is paid a dollar, that person believe the dollar has been undeniably earned. Hence, if they get paid less the next time around, they believe they are being cheated. No one wants to think that they were ever overpaid.
The content industry has made a pretty penny by ramping up demand and tightly controlling distribution. By gaming the system, they could get far more money than their product is actually worth. But now they see their tight controls on distribution loosening. By applying the above fallacy, they conclude that they deserve to have all the rewards of their previous business model, and that they are being cheated if they get paid closer to what their product is worth.
The CLC is a major component of Canada's socialist axis. They don't give a damn about IP, but they can be depended on to support anything that involves more regulation, the more invasive the better.
What it's really about is what Greenpeace calls "moving the needle". It's about getting people adjusted to having the government regulating the most trivial aspects of our lives. When a sufficient level of docility has been reached, an authoritarian socialist state can safely be established.
What gets my attention is the Swedes. The most obvious characteristic of the Swedes that might explain their tolerance of socialism is "how nice they are".
They say the same thing about Canadians. That scares me.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I think that depends on what you qualify as "counterfeiting" and where you live. In big cities (Toronto, Vancouver/Richmond, etc) you can usually find quite a few places (usually in Chinese malls, etc) that sell bootleg CD's, DVD's, etc, as well as imitation name-brands, etc
There's a mall full of shops like this about 5-10km from where I live, and probably at least half of what they sell there is fake/counterfeit.
I think things will have to get worse before they get better. Let them deploy the most draconian measures they can - if they want to learn the hard way, then so be it.
This is the Prohibition of our era, and it's going to be just as disastrous. But freedom always wins in the end.
I predict that this is the start of the end of the net at we know it, and the beginning of the new systems that will replace it - beyond the reach of the IP maximalists, the bloodsucking commercial interests and the media monopolies. We have the wireless mesh routers, the power-over-wifi, the huge storage capacities, commodity hardware and anonymous protocols - and much, much more.
Oop - just seen a fairy in the fireplace!
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Good thing we're already paying levies on blank media to cover this atrocity!
who wants to "educate" you on their opinion.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I think it is time for the users / buyers of audio and video to strike. Not to buy anything new for 1 week. Let us show them how pissed of we are.
United we stand !
In the NDA scenario, the only person liable is the person who signed the NDA and then violated it. I think it's perfectly legitimate for people to choose to voluntarily enter into contracts, and for there to be legal proceedings if they violate those contracts.
On the other hand, if I go download some music off the internet, I'm not violating any contract with the artist, because I never signed one. Why the music is on the internet in the first place, I don't know. Maybe the artist put it there, or maybe someone violated their non-disclosure agreement by putting it there. That's between the artist and that person, if so, and has nothing to do with the person downloading the music.
It's sort of like trade secrets and classified information. When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, someone was committing a crime by disclosing classified information. But the Times was not committing a crime by receiving and republishing it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Your argument sounds like a pretty good case for piracy being damaging to free alternatives (like open-source software), but possibly a case for it being beneficial to large, established purveyors of expensive software, like Adobe and Microsoft. It seems like, if piracy were 100% stamped out tomorrow, it would lead to a significant loss of for-cost-software's market share.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Harper's new Senators are appointed.
Screw it. I'm stickin' with IP4. The CLC can go fukemselves!
.
-
.
- aqk
F U
Well of course! We Canadians have a "secret agenda"!
We plan to slowly dribble southward, turning your god-fearing christian society into socialist homosexual commies like us!
Mwaahhaaa haaa!
Not much you can do about it, now that Wall st has tanked. The US military is next...
Hey, Obama is our first plant.
.
- aqk
F U
Funny how you assume everybody has the same ethical principles as you and any genuine differences are merely 'rationalization of what they know is wrong' on their part.
Some people just honestly believe that while sane copyright laws would be best (5, at most 10 years protection and no criminal penalties ever, to begin with), no copyright at all would lead to a better world than the one we're living in right now.
Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing.
No, it isn't, unless you are legally and grammatically redefining the term (which the corporate propaganda has steadily worked at, successfully in your case). Stealing is when you take real property without returning it, or pass someone's ideas off as your own. Really, consult the dictionary or law. Copyright infringement is closer to libel or fraud than theft.
And, as a canadian, you should read Canada's Copyright Act before expounding publicly on what is right and wrong about copying. Private copying of music for personal use, for instance, has been supported for quite a while (see section 80), and thus is neither illegal nor unethical.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I would imagine people wouldn't think of them as victimless crimes if the people and corporations they were ripping off most of the time were multi-millionaires.
creative products are incredibly time consuming to make. Yes, distribution is cheap, but by focusing only on distribution, the entire creative process is ignored.
As Jacques Attali has pointed out, the exchange value placed on music, since the 1500's, has always dealt with this problem. There is simply no way to accurately compensate the labour of composition. Because of this, reproductions (sheet music initially and recordings now) are priced according to their use value to the audience, i.e. what the market will bear. It has been used as a rallying point for capitalism, especially in the early stages.
So, your argument about the creative process is unfortunately deflated by 500 years of european history. The industry has had to use a workaround, controlling distribution of reproductions. Now that that business model has failed due to technological innovation, so have the ethical arguments that shore up that business model.
Performance, on the other hand, can be assessed a fee fairly easily. This is where the artist gets compensated for labour. Commissioned works are included in this.
Damn those pesky terrorists
If IP law is "good for our country" or "our society", then the average citizen should be able to see the benefits. If the average citizen can't see any benefits or sees only benefits for corporations, but none for the citizenry/society, then it's a 'one-way' deal only benefiting a select group.
That is inherently unfair in a free and equal society.
I assert that the problem is the "Mickey-Mouse" copyright extension and a similar problem with patent-life in relation to the useful life of technology and technological ideas.
The purpose of copyright and patent was to encourage invention/creation to the benefit of the public good. Unfortunately, with copyright terms like 75 years after death of artist -- the public will never see any benefits of honoring copyright. Therefore -- the entire idea of "copyright" is "void". The benefit is all "one-way" for giving the artist a monopoly on copying and distributing his work just as with technology patents -- by the time patent term ends, at least in the computer industry, the technology is usually obsolete -- and again the original purpose of benefiting society is voided.
Given the long length of copyrights and the long life of technology patents (vs. their useful life), I assert the concepts are antithetical to benefiting society as a whole or its citizenry.
I think this is a perfectly good explanation for the increase in 'piracy' -- piracy is the only way to return the benefit to the citizens in the absence of a just government.
Speak for yourself, Darlin'.
The agenda isn't secret--It's been open since at least Lester B.(Nobel Prize-Winning Twit) Pearson.
Moreover, there's no plan to change anything about the US. Our left-wing NGOs have their hands full just changing Canada and turning it into a colony of the United Nations. Among other problems, the Albertans and Outer Ontarians refuse to cooperate, and an attempt to disarm the population seems to have failed.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Why don't they run a referendum in every country on the IP/copyright issues? Let's see how most people feel about it.