Canadian Copyright Lobby Fights Anti-Spyware Legislation

An anonymous reader writes "New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently allow spyware to be installed without authorization. 'The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means.' There have also been proposals to extend the exemptions granted to telecom providers to include the installation of programs without the user's express consent, which Geist says will 'leave the door open to private, surreptitious surveillance.'"

Comments

Two faces of a coin

[Voulnet]

The more spyware and copyright lobbyists get mentioned together in legislation environments, the better. Since the majority of the folks in the judicial system are not tech-savvy, this may be a good chance to print a very bad (and true) trait on the operations of the copyright lobby.

Re:Two faces of a coin

[QuoteMstr]

I think corruption is only a partial explanation for these terrible laws.

As we age, through repetition, our worldview becomes burned into our minds like a phosphor afterglow on an old CRT. We then tend to face novel situations by constructing analogies between them and our ingrained repertoire of concepts, which explains the prevalence of car analogies for computing. But like all analogies, these are imperfect, and when aged lawmakers try to legislate based on these analogies, we get bad policy. Thus, to get truly effective policy, we need people who have an innate understanding of the subject: as the cynical old saying goes, "change comes one funeral at a time."

By the way: when will people start using computer analogies to explain cars?

Re:Let me guess...

[QuoteMstr]

I'm ambivalent on whether the parent is troll, but regardless, he has a salient point: when a significant portion of society breaks a law, there's not something wrong with the society, but with the law. Authority to govern comes from the consent of the governed. Ubiquitous lawbreaking without social consequence* is tantamount to retracting that consent. It's a terrible situation: not only is there a very real personal danger of capricious enforcement, but when a lawmaking apparatus is so aloof that it deems most of the people who make up a society unfit to be part of that society, that society is likely very sick in other respects as well.

* That is, practically nobody will shun you for sharing files, or smoking pot, (or in the 1920s) going to a speakeasy, but if you are acquitted of a murder on a technicality, you can expect to lose many of your friends.

Re:Let me guess...

[dgatwood]

It's the continued criminalization of a tiny fraction of the population. Most people don't want to live in a trash heap, so they don't throw trash everywhere. When it comes to things like piracy, it's far more complex. With copyright, one can break the law and realize that its existence is better than its nonexistence. Many justify this (and I'm not arguing for or against here) in large part because the original purpose of copyright was not to stop individuals from copying things for personal use. That narrow interpretation of the law is a relatively recent abuse.

The purpose of modern copyright (for at least two centuries) has been to protect authors, composers, artists, and musicians, not the publishing industry. More to the point, a large part of its purpose was to protect those people from the industry---so that people who create an original work of authorship can shop it around to a publisher and have recourse if the publisher steals the work, publishes it without permission, and keeps the profits. It was primarily concerned with large-scale commercial copying, not individual copying---to such a degree that the impact on the commercial viability of the work is a consideration for a fair use defense. Indeed, when copyright was created, the notion of personal copying was absurd.

Indeed, the thought of prosecuting individuals wasn't really even a consideration (at least in the U.S.) before the 1980s and Sony v Universal. Indeed, we can largely blame this mentality on the dissenting arguments posed by Blackmun et al. Prior to that, small-scale copying was not only mostly ignored, but in the few cases where it came up (e.g. Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States), they got smacked down by the courts pretty badly. Over the past thirty years or so, however, copyright has taken a rather dramatic right turn towards corporate welfare, with absurd term extensions that essentially eradicate the public domain as we know it, dramatic scaling back of fair use rights, lawsuits against individuals and small-scale copying, and various egregious anticompetitive practices like the absurd "three note rule" (The Chiffons v. George Harrison), all of which are intended to further tighten the publishing/recording/movie industry's grasp on the creations of we, the artists, musicians, authors, etc.

So even though I don't condone copyright infringement, even I as a composer, writer, and computer programmer have a hard time with the way copyright is being abused to go after two bit infringement, enough so that I'd rather see copyright law and enforcement rolled back to about 1970, but not enough so that I'd want to see copyright go away altogether. It still is very useful at preventing corporations from stealing people's creations... up until the point at which they sign the contract, anyway, at which point the content creators are usually screwed.... You know... maybe we should roll it back farther than 1970... or at least seriously revisit the notion of works for hire and seriously tighten up what constitutes a work for hire, seriously limit corporate ownership of copyrights, and in general take back copyright from the leachers... and I don't mean the ones on Bittorrent.