Canadian SOPA Could Target YouTube

bs0d3 writes "The music industry is seeking over a dozen changes to Canadian anti-piracy bill C-11, including website blocking, Internet termination for alleged repeat infringers, and an expansion of the "enabler" provision that is supposedly designed to target pirate sites. Meanwhile, the Entertainment Software Association of Canada also wants an expansion of the enabler provision along with further tightening of the already-restrictive digital lock rules. It's concerning that some of these expansions will create a risky situation for legitimate websites, as SOPA did in the U.S. Michael Geist outlines the legal history and complications here."

Comments

Oh, Canada

[elrous0]

Looks like the citizens of every country are going to have to stay on careful guard these days. When the music industry loses in one country, they just shift focus to another for a while (then later try to sneak back in under the radar where they lost). I guess they're hoping they have the money to wait everyone out. Sadly, they may be right.

Couldn't someone start a rumor that this bill is anti-French? At least that would get Quebec to come out against it. Of course, that's a pretty dubious ally. But you take what you can get.

Re:Oh, Canada

[jamstar7]

Typical MAFIAA tactics. If you get stepped on at home, go overseas and push your laws through, then come back to the US and push again, with the added excuse of 'This just gets us parity with $COUNTRY_X's laws. We need this to stay on parity with our treaties with them' and it goes through.

The SOPA war is far from over. Hell, we're just now seeing the openning skirmishes. Why doesn't the MAFIAA just come out and say 'All yer IP is belong to us' already and be done with it?

Re:Oh, Canada

[Nemyst]

At least Quebec didn't vote the Conservatives into power...

Re:Oh, Canada

[dumuzi]

Canada = Overseas? I know the USA education system has myopic geography but putting an ocean between Canada and the USA......wow.

Re:Oh, Canada

[elrous0]

Well, the Great Lakes are pretty big.

Re:Oh, Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

The companies which are members of the music and film industry associations of America like to hide behind their RIAA and MPAA acronyms. Turnabout is fair play.

Re:Oh, Canada

[Nadaka]

That is completely ignoring the fact that media companies grew directly out of the real mafia that ran saloons, music halls, theaters and "distribution" (trucking).

Re:Oh, Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll much?

Quebec voted against the current Conservative government. We massively voted for the NPD, which is a party more interested in social issues and the people. The current party in power who's not listening to Canadian wasn't voted in by Quebec, it was voted in by the rest of Canada. Shocking EH! As a French speaker, born in Montreal, I can tell you that I dislike the "Office de la langue Française" and how they are obcess with protecting the french language and the culture. But who gives a fuck about that, this isn't what C-11 is about.

Seriously, modify your comments with black or jewish people instead of Quebec and ask yourself if you sound too much like a biggot. In Quebec, just like with the rest of Canada, we have protests about stuff that concerns all of us. We had the occupy movements in some of our cities, we had protests against being in Irak. Maybe you live in this world where Quebec is a bunch of separatists who don't care about the rest of Canada or the world, and if so, you've fallen in a bad stereotype, because that's not the case. If it was the case, Quebec wouldn't be part of Canada still, our provincial government wouldn't be the Liberals and we wouldn't have such a diverse culture from all over the world.

So, I hope you'll be more careful in the future, not just about Quebec, but about all cultures and all nations all over the world. Racist comments have no place in this day and age.

Re:Oh, Canada

[AngryDeuce]

Except the MAFIAA designation implies more than just one *AA group, and has thus come to refer to all the member of the media cartels. The "Micro$oft terminology" only referenced one company and was actually harder to type than their actual name.

I prefer to simply say MAFIAA, rather than RIAA, MPAA, Business Software Alliance (BSA), Entertainment Software Alliance (ESA), and all the other organizations that have come out in support of SOPA. It may have started out as a jab, but for most, it's come to be representative of the supporters of this crap as a whole outside of the negative connotations of the name.

Re:Oh, Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

The mafia was involved in music distribution until very recently. Now that the Soviet Union is gone the US government doesn't need the mafia to control unions and bust commie heads so they have cracked down and weakened the mob. But I assure you until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc the mafia controlled music. Have you ever heard of these clauses in music contracts that allow the label to deduct some percent of your sales for "breakage in shipping"? Yes, even in the digital age this mafia era clause still gets in your contract unless you have a good lawyer. I agree with you that "MAFIAA" is kind of juvenile. I prefer the term "media cartels" because it is both technically accurate and an allusion to their criminal past both as mobbed up shipping companies and patent violating movie studios.

Re:Oh, Canada

[elrous0]

borderline racist

French is a race now?

And why was I not told?!?!?

Re:Oh, Canada

[Forbman]

No, it's not. The MPAA & RIAA (aka "MAFIAA") are practicing a form of legalized racketeering, bribery, intimidation, etc. Except rather than having thick-necked goons do the enforcement late at night, they're using slick attorneys and lobbyists to abstract away the dirty work from their hands to the government's.

The "Rule of Law" argument is really nice and all, especially when you're writing all the rules.

Remember, all the seizures of arts in France by the Nazis was "legal", too.

you know

[masternerdguy]

So it isn't just American stupidity then folks. Quit claiming your countries are so much more just and infallible.

Re:you know

[quacking duck]

"We" voted the fundamentalist Conservative party into majority last year. Probably the ONLY reason bad laws weren't passed the last five years is they'd been kept in check with a minority. Infallible? Canada? Hah!

There's no stopping this crap bill or ACTA this time. The next federal election is 3 years away, people will have forgotten this by then (assuming they haven't been locked up in the new mega-prisons thanks to an massive crime and punishment bill that even Texas Republicans said was unworkable, having tried the same thing themselves and failed miserably).

we need a tech star chamber

[Thud457]

Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Toshiba, Samsung and Comcast should just create a consortium.
The purpose of this consortium would be to buy up the media companies and put a bullet in their head .
It's time we stopped the tail from wagging the dog here. It's just good business.

Actual article website

[HellKnite]

Can we link to Michael Geist's actual article rather than that horrid looking ActivePolitic website?

Original

C-11 is NOTHING like SOPA, and milder then DMCA

[JimCanuck]

Please, C-11 does nothing of the sort.

C-11 is really just renaming some things in the original copyright acts, doesn't change the fact you must go to court to prove your case before having someone's website pulled, charged or anything.

It adds a bunch of non-specifics about the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT in the law), that we signed and never actually changed our copyrights to agree with. Its you know only been 10 years since the Liberals signed it and had not done anything about it Federally.

Also, most of the law, is worded to match that agreement, especially relating to internet sharing, however, the law was written not targeting the "service providers" and "users" as the agreement was originally signed and the American's adopted it as the DMCA, it actually appears to only target the people who are hosting/running the services. Which is following the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling about P2P file sharing being legal, as long as your not advertising, or benefiting through the copyright infringement financially.

Which seems to be why they added this part:

(2.4) In determining whether a person has infringed copyright under subsection (2.3), the court may consider

(a) whether the person expressly or implicitly marketed or promoted the service as one that could be used to enable acts of copyright infringement;

(b) whether the person had knowledge that the service was used to enable a significant number of acts of copyright infringement;

(c) whether the service has significant uses other than to enable acts of copyright infringement;

(d) the person’s ability, as part of providing the service, to limit acts of copyright infringement, and any action taken by the person to do so;

(e) any benefits the person received as a result of enabling the acts of copyright infringement; and

(f) the economic viability of the provision of the service if it were not used to enable acts of copyright infringement.

It is all about whether your providing a "service" to aid in copyright infridgement. Not actually the users. MegaUpload = No good, Torrents/Gnutella shared among peoples personal computers = okay still.

Re:C-11 is NOTHING like SOPA, and milder then DMCA

[mark-t]

C11 contains explicit exemptions to copyright infringement under a "fair dealings" guideline, but simultaneously effectively revokes all of those exemptions if or whenever the work in question has any form of digital lock. It has absolutely no fair use exemptions to circumventing digital locks. You can be breaking the law under C-11 even without violating copyright! C11 is *FAR* more restrictive than the DMCA, which contains fair use exemptions to its provisions.

Re:C-11 is NOTHING like SOPA, and milder then DMCA

[JonySuede]

Breaking any type of "digital" lock on something, whether copyrighted or not, without the owners permission under Canadian law is illegal.

Please cite the law as I will cite the a judgment CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339, 2004 SCC 13 :

...
Under s. 29 of the Copyright Act, fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study does not infringe copyright. “Research” must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that users’ rights are not unduly constrained, and is not limited to non-commercial or private contexts. Lawyers carrying on the business of law for profit are conducting research within the meaning of s. 29. The following factors help determine whether a dealing is fair: the purpose of the dealing, the character of the dealing, the amount of the dealing, the nature of the work, available alternatives to the dealing, and the effect of the dealing on the work. Here, the Law Society’s dealings with the publishers’ works through its custom photocopy service were research-based and fair. The access policy places appropriate limits on the type of copying that the Law Society will do. If a request does not appear to be for the purpose of research, criticism, review or private study, the copy will not be made. If a question arises as to whether the stated purpose is legitimate, the reference librarian will review the matter. The access policy limits the amount of work that will be copied, and the reference librarian reviews requests that exceed what might typically be considered reasonable and has the right to refuse to fulfill a request.

The Law Society did not authorize copyright infringement by providing selfservice photocopiers for use by its patrons in the Great Library. While authorization can be inferred from acts that are less than direct and positive, a person does not authorize infringement by authorizing the mere use of equipment that could be used to infringe copyright. Courts should presume that a person who authorizes an activity does so only so far as it is in accordance with the law. This presumption may be rebutted if it is shown that a certain relationship or degree of control existed between the alleged authorizer and the persons who committed the copyright infringement. Here, there was no evidence that the copiers had been used in a manner that was not consistent with copyright law. Moreover, the Law Society’s posting of a notice warning that it will not be responsible for any copies made in infringement of copyright does not constitute an express acknowledgement that the copiers will be used in an illegal manner. Finally, even if there were evidence of the copiers having been used to infringe copyright, the Law Society lacks sufficient control over the Great Library’s patrons to permit the conclusion that it sanctioned, approved or countenanced the infringement. ...
 

also there is another case in the lower court that used that judgment to allow personal backup so please cite the law you refer to

Idiots!

[Tyr07]

You can't FORCE people to buy your product. You need to make your product desirable to buy!

Half the industry in any sector is doing this now. We're tired of being ripped off by paying to watch crappy movies, buy an entire CD when only one song is good, buy a video game to play it for five minutes then realize it sucks and so fourth. Demos are virtually gone, trailers are misleading, prices are higher out here for everything.

There have been movies streamed off the net I've watched. I was bored and had nothing to do. You assume I would buy it, some of these movies are TERRIBLE and I would have never bought it in the first place. I'd just find something else to do. You keep assuming any person who ever watched or listened to your content would have immediately bought it giving you $$$. You're wrong, so wrong.

I've played video games before buying them, like Mass Effect. After that I immediately bought it, and the second one as soon as it came out, and will immediately buy the 3rd as soon as it comes out too. That's because it was a quality product and I loved it.

I did the same thing with Starcraft 2, played it at a friends, loved it, bought it. I didn't buy it at release because I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy it.

I still haven't purchased SWTOR because I don't know if it's that good, I saw a few videos, haven't played it. For the cost versus time playing it, not worth it to me right now.

If I could play the first few levels to try it out and see if I like it, I might buy it. I work for my bloody money and I'm tired of every single person thinking their product is so good that they deserve some of my money!

So many artists would be ignored, people would not buy their music, or listen to it that much, watch movies by directors, go out to theater, recommend it to other people if the restrictions where always 100% you have to get some of my money before I get to know if it's worth it.

People would just do other things more and spend less time with digital media.

Actually, this could be doing society a FAVOR, we'll stop giving as much money to these corporations, spend more time at bars socializing or going to events.
Then we'd spend less money on huge TV's since we use it less, less on hard drives to store media, less on monitors.

I'm not saying it'd kill the industry, but they have this magic preconception that suddenly sales would super boom. They forget that people are strangled by high rents, gas prices and low wage jobs and that's a big chunk of why their crap isn't selling.

except

[unity100]

that you exported your shit over there. your idiocy in your own country allowed the private interests to set up a globe spanning racketeering operation.

Eh?

[Dynedain]

Wait, I though Canada had a levy on all CDs and magnetic media (Flash as well?) so that the recording industry could get compensation for piracy?

They get compensation, and the power to block or take down sites? That seems like a bit too much of a handout to a particular industry for my tastes.