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Canada Remains a 'Safe Haven' For Online Piracy, Rightsholders Claim (torrentfreak.com)
The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups are calling out Canada, claiming that it remains a "safe haven" for copyright infringers and pirate sites, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: One of the main criticisms is that, despite having been called out repeatedly in the past, the country still offers a home to many pirate sites. "For a number of years, extending well into the current decade, Canada had a well-deserved reputation as a safe haven for some of the most massive and flagrant Internet sites dedicated to the online theft of copyright material," IIPA writes. Another disturbing development, according to IIPA, is the emergence of stand-alone BitTorrent applications that allow users to stream content directly through an attractive and user-friendly interface, hinting at Popcorn Time. In addition to the traditional pirate sites that remain in Canada, IIPA reports that several websites offering modified game console gear have also moved there in an attempt to escape liability under U.S. law.
It's probably a net good for the world. The sooner these leeches are cut off, the better for literally everyone involved in the equation other than themselves.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Canadians chose to write their laws in a way that favors consumers over major content distributors.
Canadians are OK with this.
Screw off, big media. Eat a puck.
So the poor snowflakes over at the MaPhiAA are tired of "calling out" Canada for not bending over to ensure its profits.
Well, BOO-FUCKING-HOO!
AC comments get piped to
Or the MPAAA & RIAAA as they're called north of the border.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Who knows, maybe this spells the end of the copyright mafia.
Calling out Canada on their terrorist like activities. I mean ultimately this piracy is funding ISIS and Russian hackers.
I think we all know what this means.
It's time to invade Canada!
In other words they have perfectly sensible piracy laws that don't roll through peoples lives like like a WWII sea mine for copying a few songs/movies. These agencies lost the right to make these kinds of claims when they began hitting people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and jail terms for making duplicates of their crap and calling it "theft" of "intellectual property", while at the same time demanding that they not be held accountable when in their steamrolling operations they hit droves of innocent people with copyright claims/take-down notices.
They're not even a real country anyway
Because contents producers don't like the lax copyrights laws in Canada, there is less content available in Canada through the regular paid channels (ex. Netflix). This is only fair! But consequently, many Canadians connect to the US through VPN to gain access to the good stuff.
We're all taxed on digital media (found guilty and sentenced regardless of whether we've actually committed an offense) so Canadian citizens tend to be a bit more blasé about benefiting from digital piracy. To us, it's not really piracy because we've paid. Maybe the **AA guys should have thought about that before lobbying successfully for the laws we ended up with.
After that, we have laws that say sharing unlicensed content is on the head of the person doing the sharing... and you actually have to prove the infringement.
So yeah, it's more difficult to stamp out pirate sites here because we expect due process and not **AA thugs wearing pseudo-police gear and issuing threatening letters that look like they're backed by the court system.
We owe you one, eh!
Don't Canadians already pay an extra fee/tax on call recording media? Wasn't this supposed to off set losses due to improper copying? And isn't there an extra fee/tax on Internet bills to cover the same sort of thing? I really don't know one way or the other, which is why I'm asking.
I blame Canada
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOR38552MJA
Your lobbyists got levies put on ALL RECORD-ABLE MEDIA.
So for every DVD,CD, Flash drive , Hard Drive, SSD.. etc...
You're already getting paid.
Suck it up buttercup, we've been deemed guilty.
So we may as well do the crime!!!
How would Americans feel if a Canadian IP rights agency was trying to influence American laws and how things were done down there?
Something tells me that it wouldn't be acceptable.
I know not all Americans feel the same way but this is how a country alienates its self from the rest of the world and given how much content the US provides for the rest of the world, these actions might be instrumental to the loss of profit in the content creators as the rest of the world stops playing this game.
In Canada we pay extra for our storage media: Hard drives, CD's , tapes, etc... It goes to the artist....
I torrent, I torrent enough to need 50TB of storage on a SAN, I ignore notice in notice...
we do not have a law suit culture here... Perhaps its the law suit system of some nations that are the problem.
*AA wants to be payed again to for you to move your content to an new system. Hell they think ripping your own cd's to play on a phone / ipod / etc is Piracy and they want to resell the same thing again with added DRM and some times even added DLC want that higher bit rate pay more.
I have seen this with payed emulation systems they do less then the free and ones that come before the payed ones. Why can't they just sell the roms?
At least with dos box games you can take the files as you want* and with thing like doom use them in source ports*.
*you can but some A hole may try to make an DMCA issue and say you must use our locked down dosbox build and copying the files is an DMCA bypass.
remove the tax and what happens to people who payed it and used the law to copy stuff can they be sued? can they use the old law to get a free pass? Do they have to fight it out in court and still lose after the costs of court?
I am very happy to be Canadian.
Not that there is any paucity of reasons of late.
Rightsholders is a condition defined in American law, which becomes extinct at US borders.
How come no one can enter, but stupidity overflows?
I believe Canada owes something to the Commonwealth, not to the USA.
If you want to protect your works, how about creating anti-copy protections that prevent the media from working outside the USA?
You either keep it to yourselves or share it with the world. Both things are not possible.
That said, I can't condone unlicensed copies, but weasels exist everywhere...
Because of the media tax that the record and movie studios lobbied for and got, it's paid legal distribution, not piracy. If they want to redefine it as piracy, they'll have to first start by repaying all the taxes that have been collected on blank media. Otherwise it's an invalid contract since no consideration was given in exchange for the taxes that buyers paid, and the studios are then guilty of fraud and theft.
Bekuz we know they are terrorittz and they eat babiez and they tell
puppiees theyare unluvd and the MPAA/RIAA are jeebus and walk on topof the watur......
The problem they have is pirates have the better product.
It just works, it doesn't hassle me for what devices I play it on, it's not greedy trying to make me pay for every device I watch it on. I mean fuck that's like if a VCR tape worked only on one TV and if you bought a new TV they expect you to buy a new tape to watch the same movie you already paid for.
Stop being retarded maybe, that's a good start. Stop region locking, there's a lot of content I'd happily buy at a reasonable price to add to my collect, but then PIRACY so DRM and if your shit service goes down, I lose my collection.
Pirated content can be safely at high quality stored on other media and collections saved.
The only real future is if they develop an international system that all countries support including the government and it's people to subscribe services and licenses to, the licensing and distribution has to include the government and be attached to government IDs for the country to apply their licenses.
If I purchase the collection of sword art online, it's registered to me forever, I can watch it on any device I own, and if you are at someones house you can temp sign in to watch a movie you paid for etc.
Like real media then you can share it reasonably, but once you leave, it goes with you, which protects the copyright holders as well as applies the convenience we expect.
That's the only realistic future for these kinds of things, and even so it won't be perfect, but until your product is better than pirated content, you're fucked.
Rightsholders is a condition defined in American law
I thought "owner of copyright" was defined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), to which all WTO members are a party.
which becomes extinct at US borders
A party to the Berne Convention is required to give the author of a work originating in a different country the same exclusive rights that it gives to authors in the same country.
All the TV networks should work together and agree that if two or more TV shows or films sound similar, just push off release/production of one of them.
Wouldn't collusion to avoid dueling movies smack of restraint of trade?
*paid
I am developing the claim that I have a religious belief that accessing culture on whatever terms I please is beneficial and that prohibiting me and others who share this belief from doing so is religious persecuted and prohibited by the Constitution. If I understand some of Trey Gowdy's recent statements right, according to him I've got a strong case. Not that I'm relying on him as a good authority, mind you. It is important to make yourself someone they don't want to mess with, though.
If your brother isn't making money from his ebook for whatever reason, it isn't a real job. If he can make money from book-concerts that is a real job. If he can in fact make money from selling ebooks then it is a real job. Regardless, your brother should have a real job.
I buy from Steam bundle sites. Humble Bundle is generally the best of them all and I buy from it the most. It also sells mobile bundles and book bundles which I also buy. I have no qualms about infringing copyright and am even going so far that it is a religious belief that I have that I should be free to engage culture as I see fit and to impose government restrictions on me infringing copyright infringes on my religious freedom which according to the Constitution should take priority.
Canadians already paid you through excessive taxes that are directed to entertainment industry. Eliminate your suckling at the public teat, then start complying. You're a fat industry in Canada spoiled already by income from blank media.
What many Slashdot posters don't understand is how to frame an argument. So many use the word "Pirate" or variations when referring to copyright infringement.
Don't you fools understand that you are acquiescing to the language of your opponent? By using their twisted definitions, you are losing the argument.
The same issue arises when using "Intellectual Property" instead of copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret. This abomination of a term lays claim to what you and I can and can not think. Like pirate, intellectual property was conceived by some marketing think tank to pervert the very language of the conversation. Using these terms only tilts the debate in their direction.
Think before using words that frame an argument. Don't be a parrot.
They make it impossible, difficult, or prohibitively expensive to get the content, and then wonder why people just pirate it. Just look at Netflix. It took years for the libraries to get even close to equitable, but now that they are 5.2 of the 30 million Canadians now subscribe. Hulu, Pandora, HBO Go, and others refuse to offer service to Canadians because greedy American corporations refuse to license the content. Quality services that do find their way to Canada and are reasonably priced get snapped up. Google Music is a great example of a service which was quickly adopted by many.
Content creators need to stop worrying about the pirates, start worrying about the people who want to be legitimate users. You could be making a lot more money if you did.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Every god damn year this report comes out, and it lies like a Sean Spicer press briefing.
The 301 watchlist report is trotted out every year. and every year Canada is one on the great boogy men to chase. Its a bad report that has little objective evidence in it, and is at most an industry ad propaganda briefing. Im sure there will be a detailed analysis out shortly, but here is one of Dr. Geists past looks at this annual right of **AA venting its spleen "because Hollywood is doomed if we don't fix this" http://www.michaelgeist.ca/201...
USA is the land of the free, from where persecuted people are free to flee to Canada.
The problem is that countries outside the US have their own laws! Trump should make a law that Americans can only download from American sites, and the problem goes away! Awesome in its simplicity .... and the rest of the world can continue on its merry way.
We should nuke Canada, just to be sure. We don't want no damn pirates stealing jobs from Ammurika!
If its not able to be downloaded anywhere, I'm very unlikely to purchase it. Movies Music or Software. Chances are if I can download it and I do. I will eventually spend money on it, maybe multiple times if need be. But very rarely if i can test, or watch it before hand. I cant tell you how many movies I've downloaded to watch 10-15 minutes of it and turn it off and delete it.
1) BS
Firstly it should be pointed out that all the data that they have used in the past about how Canada is a haven for copyright infringement has been disproved. Multiple times. The numbers they use are largely made up, and have no real basis in reality. So them coming out again, with more of the same BS should be rightly ignored.
2) REP
As the first point alludes, their reputation for bending "facts" as it suits them really isn't doing their cause or reputation any favors. In addition, in Canada they once had an ally in the Conservative party, who tasked a Minister to draft a set of laws to curtail copyright infringement in Canada. However, once release it became very transparent, and easily discoverable, that those laws were drafted by the RIAA/MPAA, verbatim. Word for word. It was a bit of irony that the laws themselves might be considered plagiarism. Once this became clear, it was all swept away, and interfering in a sovereign nations law creation process isn't going to win over a lot of fans (or voters to whom politicians might care about).
3) Laws
Just because the US legal system is in shambles, doesn't mean Canada's have to be also. We have stronger privacy laws in Canada, and I think most people of all political stripes are proud of that fact. Considering how the RIAA/MPAA does an end run around the US legal system by suing "John Doe's" by IP address, then having the court held in some crazy place like East Texas where companies vie for citizens appeal, who always rule in favor of these creeps who force the release of personal information, then they drop all of those cases, and re-try them using said personal information in other states of residence seems more than a bit absurd.
4) ISOHUNT
Finally, all that said, Canada has taken real action in the protection of copyright infringement. About the only "haven" that I was ever aware of was ISOHUNT (not including those imported Asian physical CAM DVD's which you can find someplace which are horrible, and really small fry). For whatever reason the guy who ran it had it located in BC. He fought the legal battle against the government for a long time (10 years maybe?), but eventually lost and was forced to shut down. Later it re-opened again, now being hosted in whoknowswhereistan like all the rest of the sites out there, but that is hardly Canada's fault.
So in summary the RIAA/MPAA can shove it.
The original intent under the Berne Convention was that exclusive rights subsist for the life of those heirs most likely to understand and apply the author's intent in the exploitation of a work, namely the author's children and grandchildren. The copyright term of 50 years after the death of the author, set in the early twentieth century, was thus intended to approximate the life of the author's grandchildren. The 20-year extension that began in Europe in the 1990s was intended to reflect the dramatic increase in heirs' life spans over the twentieth century.
And you're correct that a Berne member country isn't obligated to recognize a longer term of copyright in a work than the country of a work's origin. This is the "rule of the shorter term", and it's been trotted out as an excuse to spread the 20-year extension even beyond those highly developed countries that have benefited the most from twentieth-century improvements to health care.