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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!
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.
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.
To paraphrase what our Supreme Court said (back in the late 80's or early 90's - time makes things slightly fuzzy) "Peer-to-peer networking is much like having a photocopier in a library - there is nothing inherently illegal in it." We have generally had a bit more lenient an interpretation of "fair use" as well.
Please don't dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothin' new to say.
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.
The main reason we get away with a lot of piracy is that we introduced the blank media tax in 1997. At the time that meant that almost any storage media that could possibly used to store MP3s/Video had some charge placed on it that was paid to the various rights holders. Essentially the various interested parties surrendered some of their ability to go after violators so that they could get a steady paycheck. It wasn't like Canada was some piracy utopia, they just found an alternative method to get paid and were happy to settle for that.
Cut to today where most people don't even use the taxable media anymore and those paychecks are getting smaller and smaller. The rights holders have fought for years to extend the tax to other devices (like MP3 players and smartphones) and have sometimes won but usually lost or been overturned so now they're just going to make noise. They've been talking about trying to remove the tax so that they can go after individuals much like in the US.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
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.
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.
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