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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.
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.
There are levies on certain devices, and recordable media (writable CDs), now-a-days dubbed as the "ipod tax".
It only covers personal use, technically. Sharing content while making a profit is still illegal (eg. File sharing site with ads on it), and punishable with hefty fines and possible jail time.
Sharing with friends and family is a grey area, and generally regarded as safe to do.
Basicslly as long you're only downloading for personal use, there is nothing the media corps can do about it. If you seed back into the torrent swarm, however, it gets a little muddier, as technically you are contributing to sharing the content.
Android based TV boxes that use illegal streams (usually from China) are rampant around here, though, as technically there is no uploading or contributing back to the "illegal" sharing of content, so they are generally accepted as legal by the public.
Lots of gotcha's but all in all generally regarded as legal, fair use of content.
There is no additional taxes or levies on internet connections that I am aware of.
But how is the poor, poor metallica going to survive then? I mean god, they have to do concerts now! Won't someone please think of the poor metallica!
Hey Anonymous Coward, my brother is an author.
When someone steals an e-book of his work, how does he put bread on the table?
Should he "do" book-reading concerts?
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.
Also the caps on penalties are more reasonable here, making the "Pay us 5000, or we'll sue you for 1,000,000" threat ineffective. The max for non-commercial infringement up here is 5k. Since that's the max, in most circumstances, the judge would prove a much lower cost, say 100-200$.
Quoting directly: "(b) in a sum of not less than $100 and not more than $5,000 that the court considers just, with respect to all infringements involved in the proceedings for all works or other subject-matter, if the infringements are for non-commercial purposes."
The copyright trolls haven't been too interested since then.
background if you're interested:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/201...
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before