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Piracy Case Could Change Canadian Web Landscape
meatheadmike writes to tell us that a recent Canadian court case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association by isoHunt Web Technologies, Inc, could drastically change the web landscape in Canada. "The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? 'It's a huge can of worms," said David Fewer, acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. 'I am surprised that this litigation has gone under the radar as much as it has. I do think this is the most important copyright litigation going on right now.'"
If you can download their movie for free, Terrance and Phillip are going to go bankrupt.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
So this is like the Pirate Bay case, only the issues are being examined in Canada. Hope there's enough people making noise about this up north to have an impact.
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I don't understand. Is the torrent site suing the CRIAA (Canadian Recording Industry Assh*les from America) to see whether non-Canadian content is copyrighted by the CRIAA? I thought those companies were subsidiaries of the recording companies and they just cross-license their stuff.
Legalese is so very confusing.
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Everyone yells and jumps about over copyright. And while in truth yes, it will have an effect on our lives and how we conduct business, the law will never settle the matter. No matter how many judgements, treaties, proclaimations, arrests, convictions, and everything else we throw at it, it cannot change the fact that the internet is global. You can't stop the signal, nobody can. We can't simply dismantle the network, and try as we might to control what goes over it, if a connection can be made someone will figure out a way to get the data through. The internet doesn't care about copyright. It exists to transmit information between people, and nothing will ever deny that power. Not as long as it exists.
We might bear witness to a fifty year war on copyright, pirates, and blah blah blah, but the problem will never go away. The signal will always be there, someone will always have a copy, and eventually the economic drain that will come from fighting this war will bankrupt its supporters. Eventually. It might not happen in five years, or twenty, but it will happen.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
...and your OS runs your browser, and your bios loads your OS, and your hardware is the platform on which your bios runs, and your hardware uses electricity, which is generated by the power company by burning coal, which is mined from the earth. So really, this all the fault of the planet.
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It's different because Canadians have ALREADY paid for the content, in the form of a levy on all storage media. So the media companies want to be paid twice.
if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law?
I don't get it.
Are they trying to subtly make a point that only certain movies should be protected?
Or do they really feel that the general public doesn't know what a "movie" is, and could use some examples?
Maybe it's a nitpick, but something about that language just seems gratuitous, yet most news media seems to do just that.
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Sorry, no.
IsoHunt acts as a search engine and returns torrent files that can be either "legal" or "illegal".
No search engine can determine with 100% accuracy if something is legal or not, not even Google.
If I record a movie in my own garden, I can release the video on my website or even on The Pirate Bay with a license saying that only the people in my home town have the right to download the video and the rest don't.
IsoHunt will index the torrent file nevertheless and from your point of view, IsoHunt indexes an illegal torrent that should be taken down, but from my (the creator) point of view it's perfectly legal.
It's the USER'S RESPONSIBILITY to read the terms of the license, the description of the torrent file I made and download the movie if he believes he's allowed to.
So what I'm saying is that a movie or song or any binary data can be copyrighted but also can be legal to download it, it's illegal to distribute/download/upload/whatever something you don't have rights to do that and IsoHunt or any other search engine can't know that.
You can use Google nowadays for much worse things than copyright infringement, things like how to make a lockpick, how to prepare cocaine, how to steal a car, how to make a gun... but apparently a company's loss is important enough to stop something very useful to a lot of people.
It's not even worth to start commenting about cases where a company makes a movie making millions in US but doesn't feel it's worth releasing a DVD or a VHS to a small country, because they estimate they'll sell very few copies there and the profits will be smaller than the distribution and fabrication costs.
When this company retains copyright over something but yet keeps that something locked and unavailable to where I am, is that company really losing any money or suffers any losses if someone copies and gives away that stuff for free in that country? Should that company be allowed to keep copyright for 90 years on that? What was copyright supposed to be for, anyway?
+1 cause you're technically right, but seriously, if America thinks its illegal, they'll pressure someone else to think the same thing.
Only reason why tv-links went down was because of US involvement.
And how would you do that?
Let's say you have "Madonna.jpg"
How is IsoHunt supposed to know if it's
(a) a scan of a Madonna CD artwork (illegal)
(b) a picture you made with a camera of a Madonna statue
(c) a picture of your girlfriend you like to nickname "Madonna"
(d) a picture of the cover of a book that has Madonna in the name.
Or, if I make a movie of myself and friend at a party, dancing on Prince's music, and I label it "Prince - Purple rain.avi" should IsoHunt remove it because it may be the actual video of the song or should IsoHunt staff be forced to download it and count how many seconds of Purple Rain actually are (if any) so that they can determine if it's fair use (less than 30 seconds of song) or not?
If it's more than 30 seconds, do they use the Canadian laws where IsoHunt is, or MY laws, which may consider any length of song fair use?
+1 cause you're technically right, but seriously, if America thinks its illegal, they'll pressure someone else to think the same thing.
Only reason why tv-links went down was because of US involvement.
Completely true. The US attempts to push its ideals on other countries (I don't even need to give any examples, as anyone should be able to think of quite a few).
There are many items where Canada has held it's own on standpoints (copyright so far, leniency on marijuana etc). My biggest complaint is that the general viewpoint of "Americans" (as we refer to US citizens even though they aren't the only country in america) is that their viewpoint is the only right on and everyone else should follow suit.
My original post was to clarify that:
illegal in the US != illegal in other countries
Hardly redundant, and an important point to make as it seems many aren't clear on that.
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