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Tech Companies Say Don't Blame Canada For Copyright Problems
An anonymous reader writes "The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which includes a who's-who of the tech world, including Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Fujitsu, AMD, eBay, Intuit, Oracle, and Yahoo, has issued a strong defense of current Canadian copyright law, arguing that the US is wrong to place Canada on the annual Special 301 list. The submission argues that the US should not criticize Canada for not implementing anti-circumvention rules (PDF) and warns against using the Special 301 process to 'remake the world in the image of the DMCA.'"
I love the fact that I can download copy written content without penalty as long as I don't redistribute it... Fuckin' eh!!
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
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Where are these companies when it comes to US legislation?
Well, you better have a pretty catchy song and dance to go with that message ...
I vaguely remember at primary school, the use of friends/enemies lists in the ongoing process of classroom politics.
Apparently some people never grow out of classroom politics, and go on to become actual politicians. "Canada can't come to my birthday party."
There never was a south park reference joke so beautifully setup before this
That's not true. If you're looking for the best South Park joke setup, the Simpsons did it.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
But they've left out all of the dumb, anti-consumer portions that increasingly blight US law. How DARE they!
I hope the Canadians put us on a "Special Douche Bag" list
Gotta love our ability to spit on our friends
My personal opinion, as a Canadian, is that copyright regulation such as in the USA is insane. With that in mind I am proud of my Government for resisting the tide. There is a balance that needs to be drawn somewhere, I do not believe it is where industry in the USA would like it to be. With this in mind, let the USA go all hysterical: as the pendulum swings around with other parties such as my Government providing some balance the theory, and hope, is that it will eventually settle somewhere sane.
Shh.
Michael Geist's Blog - Dr. Geist is a law professor who takes a rather dim view of the constant calls to make copyright law more strict.
The Pirate Party of Canada - a small concern now, only about 100 card-carrying members, but it's not going to get any bigger (or reach the point where it's officially a party) if people don't get involved and at least send a bit of money their way to get over the legal hurdles. ($10 membership fee).
To that end, I would endorse the view that making a private copy of any copyrighted work, including time shifting, format shifting, decryption, or straight out copying, for the personal use of the person who is making the copy should *NOT* be copyright infringement, as long as the copy from which the private use copy is being made is not itself an infringing copy (or in the case where the copy from which it is made resides in a different place than Canada, nor would it be infringing on copyright under Canadian law). This exemption to copyright infringement should apply even if the copyright holder does not endorse such copying. Sharing, lending, selling, or any other way willfully distributing, giving, or providing such a private use copy to anybody else would negate this exemption, and unless they otherwise had permission from either the copyright holder or the agents that represent the copyright holder, such activity should render the person who created the copy now guilty of infringing on copyright.
The biggest reason I would advocate such a change to the current copyright law is simply owing to an issue of feasibility to enforce. If a person has made a copy of something that is truly for their own private use, there is not even a remotely possible way that anybody else would have even known that such a copy had even been made, and so it makes no sense to have any law in place that even implicitly would seem to disallow such an occurrence. Likewise, I think it makes a lot of sense to explicitly exempt such actions from copyright infringement so that people can have clearly defined boundaries on what is permitted and what is not.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When I was younger, 40 odd years ago, I used to wonder why America was considered a bastion of freedom. Possession of certain plants were highly illegal, being a communist was illegal, kids who went to the States for a year of schooling came back with stories about having to swear allegiance to the flag every day much like in a dictatorship. Black people were finally being allowed to use the same washrooms as white people. They could with a straight face have a constitution which stated all men were equal and allowed slavery.
America always seemed like the ultimate example of successful propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Well, first of all, the Constitution doesn't say that all men are created equal; the Declaration of Independence does. (Lots of Americans get those mixed up too.) The former is, in theory the supreme law of the land, while the latter is a document of great moral authority but no legal authority. But yes, it was written by a slaveowner, and that paradox occupied a great deal of the nation's early existence. It kind of came to a head in this little dustup a century and a half ago. Since then, we still haven't fully dealt with the consequences.
The basic problem is, you ask ten different Americans to tell you what "freedom" means, and you'll get eleven different definitions. Some are concerned almost exclusively with economic freedom; as long as they can make money, they're happy, regardless of what else may be going on. Some focus on social freedom: who they sleep with, where (or whether) they worship, what substances they can put in their bodies. Some are concerned primarily with freedom from foreign military threats; pretty much everyone agrees this is a prerequisite for the other freedoms, but there are and always have been many who take their concern with it to fanatical extremes -- they forget that in order to defend our freedom from those who want to take it away, we must have freedom left to defend.
And no matter what kind of freedom people are most worried about, a regrettably large number will say, in effect, "I've got my freedom, screw yours." Thus those fighting for the Confederacy, and their latter-day counterparts in white sheets and pointy hats, could claim in all seriousness that they were fighting for freedom: their freedom, and the fact that preserving their view of freedom meant denying it to large numbers of the people who lived in their society didn't bother them at all. Thus the flag could be defined as the symbol of freedom, and freedom limited to those who wished to pledge allegiance to it. Thus any act, no matter how vile, that was anti-communist could be defined as serving the interests of freedom.
Personally, my definition of freedom includes not only my freedom to do what I want to do, but others' freedom to do what they want to do, including things that I personally have no desire to do. But this definition is far from universally accepted. I don't think this is an exclusively American problem by any means, but it does seem like we're a bit better at others at fooling ourselves into thinking we're implementing a universal definition of freedom, while picking and choosing our freedoms carefully in practice.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I took a look in the IIPA Special 301 report for Brazil at http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2010/2010SPEC301BRAZIL.pdf, it's very instructive. I particularly appreciated the following part in page 141:
Priority actions requested to be taken in 2010: ... ...
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- Avoid legislation on the mandatory use of open source software by government agencies and government controlled companies.
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Honestly, is there a justifiable link between protecting intellectual property and putting restrictions on the adoption of open source software? If people used more OSS, software piracy would drop. Maybe the IIPA believes that OSS platforms are mostly used for doing software piracy... ;-)