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Wikileaks Says Public Forced Canadian DMCA Delay
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist reports
that a new WikiLeaks
cable confirms
that the Canadian Conservative government delayed introducing a
Canadian DMCA in early 2008 due to public opposition. The US
cable notes confirmation came directly from then-Industry Minister Jim
Prentice, who told US Ambassador David Wilkins that cabinet
colleagues and Conservative MPs were worried about the electoral
implications of copyright reform."
They still need to be worried about this. The Conservatives won't be getting my vote next week specifically because of DMCA 2.0 (and the Internet snooping and censoring that is certain to follow).
If that was Stephen Harper being responsive to the public during a minority, let God have mercy on our souls if he ever gets a majority.
Harper is one of the worst "We're doing it MY FUCKING WAY!" politicians we've had in YEARS, and that's WITH a minority.
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I was writing letters to my MP about this. There didn't seem to be a huge public outcry, but perhaps it really doesn't take that many letters to MPs to make a difference. I'm fairly upset about the last bill's digital lock provisions. Looks like it's time to write some letters again.
Getting less bad with each iteration??? Did you even read a summary of the most recent bill proposal? It gave consumers all kinds of rights and, in the same instant, took them away "if there was DRM". In other words, consumers would have had ZERO rights over content they bought. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
Sorry for trying to drill the point home but it's really that serious - the most recent bill proposal absolutely threw out any pretense of consumers having any rights, what-so-ever. They disguised how bad the bill was by describing all the rights that consumers had so it felt good but, in every instance, they immediately took those rights away if DRM was present (it wouldn't have had to be strong DRM - _ANY_ DRM would have stripped away all the consumer's rights).
Seriously, had that bill passed, we wouldn't have been able to legally record a show with a VCR, rip a CD, own an mp3 player (since it wouldn't have been legal to actually play anything...). It was disgusting.