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Geist On Copyright As Canada Consult Nears End
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian law professor Michael Geist, who has been leading the charge on the national copyright consultation with his SpeakOutOnCopyright.ca site, has posted his own submission to the consultation. Geist focuses on issues like fair use and circumvention, and warns against a Canadian DMCA, copyright term extension, and three-strikes program. 'If copyright veers too far toward specific technologies by mandating new protection for specific business models or technological innovations, those rules risk being overtaken as the technologies and marketplace evolve. ... It should only be a violation of the law to circumvent a technological protection measure if the underlying purpose is to infringe copyright.' He also pointed out a few days ago that Bell Canada seems to be advising content owners to sue its own customers. The public consultation ends on September 13th."
let me know when companies realize that 20th century business models don't work in the 21st century.
All we get from copyright laws are large global corporations working there way into every countries law system, molding it to help them with there profits.
O.o
I definitely applaud Geists work in both creating public awareness over copyright issues and also being ardently vehement against improper use of copyright, but this really means little until we find out whether the how the consultations are published to the lawmakers. From what i've seen in the past I almost wonder if we draft up ridiculous copyright reform bills from time to time just to keep the insanities of the various content distribution industries happy while making it easy to be shot down in parliament.
Then again, Copps did get us a blank media tax that goes...somewhere... so perhaps the this doesn't always work or just appears to be the case.
Ice Cream has no bones.
I think any copyright battles that are won and lost are relevant to any /. reader. Law is largely based on precedent and countries often look to foreign neighbors for insight into domestic policy. Likewise these evil companies are always prying at politicians to spin things into law.
âoeEducation is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.â
Make the effort to send in a submission. We have written a guide to help make it easy to put one together without understanding the intricacies of the law or the extreme proposals that have been put forward. Download the guide PDF here. It only takes a few minutes to make the point that Canadians care deeply about this. Do your part, even if all you say is "no Canadian DMCA." But do it now: the consultation ends Sunday.
If the government chooses to listen, great. If not, the consultation submissions are essential for making the political case that Canadians want a fair law. This is equally true if the government changes after an election.
And you happen to be a corporation.
If you're Canadian, take half an hour and submit an email or letter (letter is better). Use the template, or copy and paste from Prof. Geist's text, or better still write something in your own words. Stand up like the guy in the Molson's Canadian commercial.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
Negative and punitive systems distort society. Some of those systems are somewhat successful and therefore tolerable. Copyright however isn't a success story, as it must be propped up at great expense to function in a marginal manner. We should replace every such system that is both punitive and broken. Copy "right" is all about a legal taking away of the fundamental principle of nature, used by radio stations, which is that information naturally propagates, same as heat naturally flows from hot things to cold things. Copyright maximalists would spitefully have our very brains lose the ability to remember a tune, if they couldn't monetize it. Such a limitation just isn't workable. It is impossible to restrict the ability to copy through technical means, and there is no natural way for information to be uncopyable. Penalties that run to extremes in harshness and random arbitrariness are yet another indication that a system does not work. And we've turned copyrights into tradeable items, which puts the artists at a big disadvantage to the organizations who specialize in accumulating copyrights, and who also most unfairly can greatly influence the value, and who can even distort the laws regulating the business.
So rather than focusing on how to stop the "evil" of piracy, on hypothetical millions in lost profits, we should think of all the very real and unnecessary costs. It costs a lot of taxpayer monies to run the court, and those resources should not be wasted on such foolishness. There have been repeated attempts to force wholly unrelated organizations to police users, at all too conveniently overlooked massive expense to both the organization and all its users. Chilling effects go beyond scaring would-be artists away, there is also an encouragement of selfish, secretive, hoarding behavior. That slows down advancement at who knows what cost. Then, we could gain millions if budding artists didn't have to beg for permission for the use of every tiny little thing that might possibly infringe, or more like, take their chances that they won't be sued. Art would be better if artists were freer to explore, if they could discover and learn from everything others had done. If customers needed to buy even more equipment to handle their music libraries, if everyone could indulge their unique creativeness with any material that inspired them, in ways far beyond anything one lone artist could ever have envisioned-- it's incalculable the wealth that is being squandered.
Rather than trying to demonize something that isn't actually harmful, dangerous, or immoral, and try to punish violators, we should reward artists in a way that does not trample upon our right to our own culture and which gives its blessing to the highly beneficial and necessary sharing we all do all the time anyway. Patronage is such a way. Pay the artists. Don't hand them bombs and tell them they have to spend time threatening everyone who makes use of their work without negotiating price on an individual basis. Don't burden them and all society with all the extra work required to work the system. Just pay them, and let them concentrate on their art as much as possible. Patronage is not a new, untested idea either. Too easy to cast an idea as new even when it isn't, and whip up hysteria and fear of the unknown over it.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Dear ISP Owner:
We have observed that customer IPs ____, ____, ____, ....., ____, _____, and _____ have been sharing files. We also observed this is their third offense. Please unplug their connection from your service or else we will... blah blah blah.
Thank you RIAA.
.
Dear RIAA,
Fuck off. It's not my job to police YOUR limited, temporary copy privileges. I need those people to survive in this poor economy, and will continue providing a connection so long as they continue paying. Sue the customers in court if you want, but don't involve me in your paranoia.
Signed,
ISP Owner
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>Copyright worked well for generations,
Actually it's never worked. Even in the 1800s authors had problems with people copying their books illegally. Charles Dickens frequently complained about unauthorized copies of his works appearing, and even though the government tried to punish those persons, the copies kept appearing.
The founder of the Democratic Party Thomas Jefferson said the idea made little sense, because if you own a printing press, along with paper and ink, why shouldn't you be able to use your OWN property however you see fit? It's your property - nobody else should be able to tell you how to use (or not use) your own stuff. The only reason he tolerated it was because it was a time-limited privilege (7 years in the early 1800s), and therefore didn't cause too much hassle.
But now it's around 1000 years which is insane. Copy PRIVILEGE should be time limited. It shouldn't be like Mickey Mouse which is still copyrighted 50 years after the original artist (Walter Elias Disney) died. In order to enrich society, works need to fall into the public domain, just like all the other great works of fiction (Paradise Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Pilgrims Progress, Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield) have fallen into public domain. That's how you enrich a culture.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
There is a middle ground that apparently hasn't been tried much yet by the perpetual copyright and DRM crowd. The current practice with the entertainment cartel is to charge a per unit price that is grossly distorted upwards. They want to maintain some level of cash transferred "per unit" that doesn't adequately reflect the reproduction costs, it's inflated severely. They are still living way in the past when it really DID cost them a lot of money to make a "copy for sale". It just ain't that way any more, yet their per unit pricing hasn't changed much.
Especially when you look at digital copies of this or that, but it still applies to data bits on a stamped plastic disk as well. Just *perhaps* if they had tracked technological innovation better, and seriously dropped what they charged, they could have maintained similar profits by merely increasing their sales using the "economy of scale" model. And, at the same time, not alienated their customers so much.
A *buck* for a few megs of download for *one* tune? Out to lunch. Ridiculously over priced, how about 5 cents or so? That might be like one cent bandwith, 4 cents profit. I don't know exactly but it would be something like that. I mean, do those media cartel goofballs REALLY think and expect that people are going to fill up their multi gigabyte capacity tune players at a buck a song? What is that, what it costs to buy a freeking brand new car to do that legally? Are they just crazy, or stupid, or both? And they wonder why a lot of their potential customers are abandoning that pricing model being offered?
10-20 bucks for less than a dollar worth of stamped plastic and some printed up cardboard? Try two or three bucks instead. And I *know* it can be done for that price at new retail level, I have bought old TV show stuff brand new on DVD for that at chinamart before. Just sell a lot more copies at a more reasonable price, because people are more apt to buy and not peg leg it when it isn't obviously blatant price gouging.