In the Weimar Republic, inflation served to drive wealth towards real assets and therefore towards those who produced such assets. This effected a recovery - a "re-inflation" - of the German manufacturing sector. Then, once hyperinflation had done its job, they created a new currency based on debt issued by a land bank and backed by real assets. Yes, they could have done this without hurting workers so badly, if they had had superior social insurance.
Oh yes, absolutely! If only the National Socialists had come to power earlier. They would have provided social insurance for all of the German workers. Especially government workers. And especially the military. Then the hyperinflation would have been good. All because the Reichsbank would have printed even more money in order for people to redeem their insurance.
I feel so stupid that you came up with such a brilliant solution before me!
There is no question at all that synthetic antibacterial substances, often added to consumer products, will directly breed resistant bacteria.
As one ubiquitous example, please research triclosan's effects on bacterial biology, as well as its environmental impact. Triclosan will degrade into dioxin and other carcinogens when exposed to sunlight. The proof is in the pudding.
Lastly, even if there were such a synthetic additive which somehow did not potentiate microbial resistance, it would still likely add to our constant daily bombardment of carcinogens.
Trading short term pathology for a longer term pathology, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually to deal with, is not a very wise public health strategy. There are no short cuts.
how many individuals' accounts had their privacy compromised
how many messages were captured by the FBI's data vacuum cleaner
whether the messages were really destroyed or not (what does unspecified means mean?)
whether the FBI is even telling the truth or not
how many other times this kind of overproduction has occurred since 9/11
The writer of this article, Eric Lichtblau, won a shared Pulitzer Prize for his work in exposing the illegal warrantless wiretapping program, authorized by the government and championed by the White House after 9/11. In fact, it was in existence even before 9/11, but that's another story entirely.
This program supposedly expired just yesterday when congress let the clock run out on its dependent legislation. The problem here, clearly, is that it doesn't matter if this program is never renewed; overproduction of data under FISA will still happen all the time. That's the entire point of this article. There are no checks and balances. There is no accountability. There is NOTHING. Total secrecy and legal immunity are all but guaranteed for the perpetrators. Period.
Does anyone really expect this horseshit of a proposal to become law?? This is almost certainly a political compromise (and ploy) by the British Government, to make it appear like they're doing their damnedest to go after those swashbuckling "copyright terrorists". Even in the highly unlikely event that it does pass, here are 3 reasons why it's toast:
That ever-so-pesky legal principle of habeas corpus. Coming from the little meaning "have you the body?" in latin, if a crime has not been committed, then charges cannot be filed- let alone an actual punishment levied- against the supposed "perpetrator". And I don't know (or care) what any insane person, crypto-fascist or record cartel apologist might think or try to spin it, but an IP address does not, I repeat, DOES NOT, and CANNOT, constitute proof of wrongdoing.
That other ever-so-pesky legal principle of due process. They want to punish suspects of a crime, without allowing the judicial system to weigh in on a case-by-case basis? No legal representation, or defense of supposed crimes permitted? Nah-uh. Not unless we're talking about a North Korea, China, Burma, or take-your-pick of any number authoritarian countries known to subvert internet activities of their various citizenry.
That horrible, annoying, good-for-nothing legal principle of probable case. Notice I did not say "probably cause". This principle is what prevents the police from locking you up whenever they feel like it- and what makes democratic countries different from the old Soviet Union, or modern day Putin's Russia. It's also strongly tied to those other pesky principles of the presumption of innocence and beyond a reasonable doubt, which also tear away at the very tenet of this heinous proposal. There must be a legal basis from which to arrest and detain- let alone exact punishment upon- a suspect of a crime and once again, an IP address, even in context, proves nothing. And even if it did, for argument's sake, the proposed legislation still doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
So, unless these lovers of free speech, the free market and freedom in general can somehow connect "the terrorists" or "the kiddie porn traffickers" with file sharing and scare this legislation into being, this is going absolutely nowhere. The politicians can say they tried, though.
[*Go easy on me, guys! I haven't posted here in ages, so please don't mod this into Hades.]
Exactly. This retarded legislation will never make it past the Senate. The Conservatives are bitching about bills that STILL haven't been passed by the upper house after languishing in there for over a year. Without Senate and Supreme Court support, Harper has no real power. Just as it should be.:) *knock wood*
This petition influenced the outcome of the last blank recording media levy here in Canada. You'd do well to sign it now and get as many people as you know to sign it.
I strongly advise anyone even considering getting even remotely involved with options, to visit the Chicago Board Options Exchange's basic education page. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange also has the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options available on its site. Most people simply don't understand what they are getting into with options. Although options on equity securities can potentially lead to tremendous payouts, particularly at the height of the largest bull market in history, they can much more easily turn out to be completely worthless. If you don't take the time to understand the inherent risks of options trading, you deserve to get burned at some point in the future.
This is just a lone opinion, but remember back when the MCI-Worldcom deal was on the table? Regulators were jittery from the outset because they knew that without a proper divestiture of MCI's internet assets before the merger close, the combined company would end up controlling more than 70% of the backbone business.
I think about this latest proposal the same way. You have one company in control of two major backbones (UUNET and Sprint), not to mention their own service, ONNet. I would venture to guess that this combined company would control a minimum 60% of the backbone biz, without any divestiture of Sprint's internet business. That just isn't gonna happen, folks. I can't see another large backbone being spun off like MCI's infrastructure was to Cable and Wireless. I know a lot of you will probably see this differently, but that's my take...
A clarification of the first statement: the CRTC does not force Bell, or anyone else, to use PPP over Ethernet to provision third party access to any broadband infrastructure. I know that you didn't say that they did, but there must be no confusion as to what the CRTC's role in this is.
Bell would certainly like you to believe that they were unfairly forced to open up their infrastructure to competitors and that the only way to provision that access was through PPPoE, but it simply isn't true. Basically no one, but Bell themselves, are in favour of provisioning open access via the PPPoE encapsulation- not the CAIP, not the CCTA and certainly not the end-user.
PPPoE is basically alpha, with respect to driver development right now, it's as proprietary as can be, it provides absolutely no benefits for the end-user and, in my own opinion, has no business being in the Sympatico HSE service, in Ontario and Quebec.
First, some background info: since the beginning of the year, I've been involved with a consumer's telecommunications organization, the Rogers @Home User's Association. We are a collection of about 500 users of the Rogers@Home internet service, based in both the Ontario and British Columbia provinces in Canada. I serve as their technical director and liaison to management.
What do we do and why do we exist? We formed out of necessity. The entire service had literally collapsed under its own weight, back in December. All of our circuits going to the @Home Network in the US, were completely oversaturated. This had the effect of raising minimum network latency during peak hours, to an excess of 400, 500 and even 600 milliseconds. People were extremely angry, technical support could offer no help, hold times were a minimum of 30 minutes and management would not admit that anything was wrong. Hell, management was thoroughly incommunicado. That entire mess lasted six weeks before it was corrected in the middle of December.
I went to the CRTC, our equivalent of the American FCC, and complained bitterly. They proved to be more technically inept than I had ever dreamed of and didn't want to touch the issue with a 10 foot pole. I went to other industry officials, but nothing seemed to help.
Fast forward to February- after many of my comments in the various related newsgroups, a successful petition of angry subscribers, the threat of legal action and the RHUA right there in the thick of things, I received a call from the General Manager of Rogers Cablesystems (parent to Rogers@Home), of the Greater Toronto Area. Seeing as Rogers is the largest cable operator (MSO) in all of Canada, I was a little stunned that I would receive a call from someone so high up in the company. He was interested in setting up a meeting between senior management and I, to discuss the various problems with the service. Over the next few months, two meetings took place, the results of which can both be viewed here.
Now I'm not going to say that the results were very encouraging, but I will say that this whole process has been a step in the right direction. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other consumers groups in the sphere of telecommunications who have direct lines of communication to the senior management of their respective service(s). Due to these open channels of communication between me, our other regional reps and management, some users experiencing serious problems, were able to receive attention a lot sooner than they normally would have. The RHUA is continuing its efforts to hold management accountable for any problems that affect this service and to ensure that the needs of our subscribers are tended to quickly and efficiently.
Now, what the hell does any of this have to do with third party access to the various broadband infrastructures? Well, I've been dealing with the management of my service long enough to know that they, along with every other MSO out there, won't take this newest CRTC ruling lying down and they have the power to see their will through. Open access to the coaxial broadband infrastructure was ordered way back in 1996! Today we're in the same, damned place as we were back then. I don't think this ruling is likely to change anything in the near term. Rogers has revealed a target date of mid-2000 for the provisioning of their service to third party ISP's. Another thing I learned from my management meetings is that MSO's are definitely NOT very good at following target dates. As I have no faith in the CRTC to see their ruling through, God Only Knows (tm) when we'll see any real movement on this issue.
As per my subject of this posts, there are a great deal many details that have yet to be ironed out in order for the CRTC's ruling to be followed. In my opinion, they've barely even started yet. This document contains the recent CRTC decision that has been referenced by our press as of yesterday. Here is another URL that contains basically all the related links to CRTC rulings on broadband internet access. Of particular note is the Canadian Cable Television Association's technical report on providing third party access to the coaxial infrastructure. Be warned that this link is to a dreaded Micros~1 Word 97 Document, but the information contained therein is extremely interesting and critically important, IMHO. The methods for actually provisioning third party access are outlined and briefly discussed.
This aspect is more significant than most people realize. Anyone who is familiar with techologies favouring the PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) encapsulation, will clue in to what I'm talking about here. To make a long story short, PPPoE was developed with third party access to the broadband infrastructures in mind (particularly DSL-related access methods). The scary thing about this technology is that it does not benefit the consumer- not in the slightest. It contains network management features that can only benefit the service providers, themselves. The features are- again, in my opinion- inherently oppressive to all consumers of these broadband services. They are designed to usurp power from users of broadband services, into the hands of their providers. Features include isolating each user's traffic into a "virtual circuit", completely dynamic IP addressing from designated address pools, point and click network monitoring, and a point and click user disconnection option, among many others. I quoted the virtual circuit term above because VC's are traditionally supposed to provide some enhanced reliability, but PPPoE does nothing of the sort.
Basically, if you're worried about CALEA, your online privacy and security, your consumer rights, or anything else that's related to your electronic freedom, be sure to check your concerns at the door in a PPPoE-enabled world. This technology puts way too much power in the hands of individual providers who will be free to do as they choose with it. Snooping on your online communications will be a cinch, as the virtual circuit ID is all that must be isolated for a party to easily see everything you're doing. I don't think I need to explain any further implications of this technology. The sad reality is that I feel that government regulation of broadband services will have to be implemented, in order to curb the abuses of service providers at some point in the future. And as we all know, regulation is definitely not the way to go.
I brought this all up because AOL and GTE specifically used PPPoE hardware, manufactured by Redback Networks, to provision third party access to GTE's coaxial infrastructure. Although I'm betting that PPPoE will not be implemented for open access to the coax infrastructure up here, I AM worried that a different scenario will unfold in the US. I think that every possible step must be taken to prevent PPPoE from being used to provision third party access to any and all broadband infrastructures in the US. This technology has already surreptitiously found its way into several consumer DSL markets out there, both in the US and in Canada, but it must not be permitted to come to cable.
I'm not against Redback Networks, UUNET, AOL, or any other proponents of the very proprietary PPPoE technology; it's just that unless I see any clearcut benefits to consumers out there and my doubts are confirmed by more and more existing and future broadband users, I will personally do all that I can to spread the word about PPP over Ethernet and its implications. One thing I'd really like to see, is someone like Bruce Schneier, and/or an organization like L0pht, go over this technology with a fine tooth comb and tear it to pieces. I have yet to read a critique of its supposed "security features".
On that note, if someone at/. wants me to write up a more detailed analysis of PPPoE for all to see, please give me a shout and I'll be more than happy to oblige.
To finish up here (you're all sighing with relief, I know), I want to say a few last things. First of all, some additional consumer groups must sprout up in the US and Canada, to pay attention to these serious developments and to protect the rights of their constituents. From what I have been able to tell thus far, there just aren't enough people who are willing to stand up and fight for their rights in an organizational manner. I have pushed and pushed for the formation of a Cox @Home user's group, but the main proponent of this idea has told me on numerous occasions that people just aren't angry enough with their service to do anything about it. And this after being well aware that Cox will implement further upstream rate caps of 128 Kbps, with NO proportional reductions in the monthly fees that subscribers pay. This is downright criminal, the way I see it and is something that's totally unjustifiable. Our upstream rates have remained at 400 Kbps because our objections to the cap were voiced very loudly, very early into the process. Purveyors of broadband services will do as they please unless they answer to a consumer authority.
Second, as the CRTC is technically clueless and toothless, with respect to consumer advocacy, our whole situation over here is in limbo, in my own view. I truly hope that American MSO's and, more importantly, American citizens interested in broadband access, observe our progress here and learn what works and what doesn't, from our successes and failures. If all goes well, the RHUA and I might have a hand in seeing how third party access is provisioned to the existing coax infrastructure.
Last but not least, we need to see management become more accountable for the products and services they provide to ordinary consumers. Good customer service is a very difficult thing to find nowadays, with respect to individual consumers. The quality of customer service you receive should not be proportional to the size of your wallet, or the pull of your company. Cable companies providing broadband services, are simply not using the very medium they are selling, to reach their customers. People feel totally left out and unappreciated by the purveyors, and they have every right to feel that way. When someone wants to complain about poor service, or voice their concerns about a related issue, they often must wade through a thick veil of bureacracy to get even the most meager of results. It has been bad- and still is bad- for users of my internet service and as terrible as that may seem, broadband subscribers south of the border have it even worse. This has got to stop now! I've always maintained the highest respect for Slashdot and sites like it (okay, there are no others like it:P), for cutting through all the bullshit and propaganda that's peddled on a daily basis nowadays. The time for action against corporate apathy for individual consumers, has come. Just the very thought that a totally free operating system like Linux, will one day overtake the most widely used product of a corporate behemoth like MS, gives me a truckload of hope for the future. My only hope is that some of the creative power behind the open source effort, spills into the domain of broadband services and the rest of the telecom world.
I just wanted to clarify the above information. Congress specifically passed and modified the patent laws so that software (applications, OSes and everything in between) would be considered assets. That's really the key word here. Assets, like the above author said, are grouped with mechanical processes, or even more specifically, material processes and objects. They are traditionally supposed to be tangible and concrete, held in check by the laws of Newtonian physics. This ruling naturally shook things up to hell from that standpoint.
So what's the big deal about assets? What you have to realize is that corporations (as opposed to just unnamed groups of people, or individuals) exist to get certain benefits, i.e. for tax breaks/shelters, to facilitate easier growth of capital, etc., etc. One big benefit to a corporate entity is to declare their material ownings as these assets and then have those assets amortize (become liquidated over time) and depreciate (become devalued over time) so they can write all of that off against their taxes. See where I'm going with this?
This alteration greatly helped out corporations that are heavily dependent on software, especially very expensive software. They buy all of this costly stuff, declare it as an asset and then write it all off. Sure, Microsoft likes it because they know other corporations will buy more of their product, eager to write it all off. It's a pretty tidy arrangement for them.
In my own opinion, I feel that this ruling is likely to hurt the growth of open source and free software in the business sector because many corporations will be happier to spend on their software and write it off, rather than just adopt software that costs little, if anything at all. In countries where corporations are hit harder by taxes, you'll probably see even more of the corporate base invest in costly (or at least costlier) software...:/
Heya, the Internet Council of Registrars can probably be of some use to you. Take a look at this page on CORE's site for a list of registrars accredited by ICANN. They're pretty scant on details (big surprise) with respect to domain transfers, so I'll give you a few tips: Joker.com has the cheapest rates of them all, followed by Firstdomain.net; both are German setups. Casdns.net charges basically the same rates as good ole NSI, but they happen to be the only registrar that actually has any information on domain name transfers. They say that you are able to transfer domain names from any other accredited registrar and pay $35 per year to maintain the existing domain(s). That information in itself is ambiguous and I'm reluctant to be the guinea pig to transfer my domain from NSI to one of these registrars. Of course I'll be transferring my domain over in a few months when I get my letter of harrassment from NSI;). One of these days I may get around to e-mailing some of the registrars, if clear information on this topic doesn't become available soon. In the meantime I'll wait for someone with an expired domain name to step up and test their luck. Good luck (hint, hint:P)...
Hardware, politics and legal precedent...
on
MP3 CD Players?
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· Score: 3
Yep, it's primarily about those three things, in my own personal opinion. During the past couple of years or so, I've often wondered why a Discman-like portable CD player that can play both mp3's and regular CD's, hasn't been brought to market. I even thought quite a bit about building one myself, although I never had the engineering experience to get it off the ground.
Regarding the hardware issue, up until around 18 months ago, it just wasn't very cost effective for most large corporate entities to build a portable device that could do real time, or near-real time audio decompression. A powerful enough DSP, like something out of the Motorola 56300 series, was just too costly to develop a consumer product upon. This is probably the least significant impediment of the three, as consumer technologies will be produced that are outside the domain of the average consumer (HDTV anyone?), nevertheless it was a logical impediment at one time.
Eventually, though, the MPMan and the Diamond Rio were produced, albeit for some comparatively hefty prices. The production of the MPMan probably was of some concern to the various parties "protecting" the rights of artists, but the Rio was really what frightened them. Diamond Multimedia, a fairly large consumer electronics firm, was encroaching upon their interests, so the RIAA took them on in court. We all know what happened. Diamond set legal precedent, but drew some obvious ire from the recording industry by doing so. Since then, Diamond jumped on to the SDMI corporate bandwagon, to make nice with the RIAA and only one other consumer electronics firm- Creative Labs- has brought out a competing product. What about Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp and all the other large electronics corporations out there; why haven't they come out with any competing products? Well, one of the main reasons is that a lot of these companies have direct interests within the recording industry. Sony, as we all know, owns a record company. Others are either investors in record companies, or they believe that they stand to lose much from a falling out with the establishment.
Imagine that you're the CEO of one of these corporations. Do you really want to risk getting blacklisted by the recording companies and by doing so, risk investor confidence in your company's stock? I really don't think so. These large companies like certainty. It pays to protect the status quo, especially if you hold all the cards. Bringing out a product that has the ability to play 150 songs on one, lone CD-R, will turn that status quo on its ear. In some places, like in my country, the recording industry has lobbied the government to impose ridiculous taxes on blank audio recording media. It isn't in their best interests for you to be able to hold that many songs on one CD-R. They will do everything in their power to thwart innovation if they stand to lose anything from the introduction of a new technology, such as mp3.
A smaller firm will have to develop a CD-based player on their own and successfully market it to the public. I'm not talking about Pine's offering, but rather, something from a larger, more established company. Until then, however, a device like this will be hard to come by and it will remain comparatively expensive. It will also obviously be looked upon as a device solely for music pirates by the recording industry, as the sheer volume of compressed music that can be fit onto one CD-R, must scare the hell out of them. They've never liked consumers being able to record their own music, so any sort of compressed audio that empowers the consumer, will compound their fears.
One final thing to consider is that such a device can only possibly appeal to people with access to a CD-R recorder. Right now that market really isn't very large when compared with the amount of people who already own some sort of regular CD player. A corporation might argue that a legitimate market for a portable audio device that'll play mp3's off of a CD-R, just isn't there yet. You can't present that argument for devices that make use of non-volatile solid state memory, as they don't require anything other than a PC and a free parallel port, or some other interface, to facilitate data transfer. This is just a lot more convenient for the general public at this time, who are interested in listening to mp3's away from their computer. I would just love to be able to play mp3 CD-R's on my Sony Discman, as I own a CD-R burner, but you have to think about all of the people who don't have immediate access to something like this.
Sorry, I forgot that the HTML formatting wouldn't automatically add newlines for me:P
Hello all. This "levy" is plagued with two very serious problems. First off, not enough terms in Bill C-32 are sufficiently defined, so that no doubts can be cast on their meanings. This creates many problems for the correct implementation for the passed laws. For instance, the terms "digital audio" and "digital audio recording media" are defined nowhere in the Canadian Copyright Act.
What is digital audio? Is it compressed/uncompressed? What digital format(s) would qualify it as digital audio? As it has been stated many times in this forum, mp3 compression allows for a normal 74 minute CD-R to hold over 800 minutes of digital audio. If you wanted to impose a levy of 25 cents per every 15 minutes of this kind of digital audio, the total would come out to nearly $27 per CD-R. This kind of monstrosity is possible with the existing wording of this amendment to our Copyright Act.
What is a digital audio recording medium? Are we talking about CD-R's here, or hard drives, or DAT tapes, or all of the above? If this levy is to be applied to all digital audio recording media, it really should be applied to all of the above types of media. Otherwise the law bears no logical format.
Second of all, this amendment to our Copyright Act makes some automatic assumptions, with respect to the "digital audio recording media" in question:
a) All media will be used solely for the purposes of recording audio.
b) All media will contain copyrighted material, which is being infringed upon by the individual performing the recording.
c) All media will contain material copyrighted by only Canadian artists.
Those are some very dangerous and fallable assumptions to make. I don't think I even need to state that a only certain percentage of such media is used to hold any kind of digital audio recordings and that such recordings are mostly of foreign (read: non-Canadian) content. Let me play with this concept for a minute. Let's suppose that, say, a conservative 20% of all actual recorded material on the CD-R medium alone was of Canadian copyrighted material. Wouldn't an American organization like the RIAA be perfectly within their rights to demand 70-80% of the total levy imposed by the copyright collective? And this supposition of mine rests on the assumption that ALL CD-R media is used solely for recording copywritten digital audio. If you assume that roughly half of all CD-R media is used for recording copyrighted digital audio, then the collectives might have a right to collect a rough figure of 10% of their original levy. A final levy of $2.50 per CD-R, automatically becomes something closer to $0.25. That's the way I formulate this levy anyway, in my own mind. We've had tradewars with the US before and I see this as no different.
I'd like to say that as a Canadian, I would not like to see this levy hold up, mainly because it will set such a dangerous precedent. I mean, what will be next? Will a levy of 10 cents per each sheet of paper be implemented, simply because each sheet can potentially be used to infringe upon copywritten Canadian literature? Will a levy of 50 cents per each inch of any knife sold be implemented because people can potentially be stabbed with any knife and the victims must be justly compensated? Will internet subscribers, particular users of broadband services, be forced to cough up some more money because they may or may not be infringing upon Canadian copyrighted material on the internet?
Anyway, I think you all get my point. The floodgates will be opened if this levy is allowed to be implemented. Certain terms are not clearly defined and the wording appears to indicate that this levy was not well thought out to begin with. The collectives should go back to the drawing board and conceive a levy which is fair- something that Canadians will accept. This one is thoroughly ridiculous and people know it. Under the legacy of the collectives, your freedom to record material you purchased, or you created is proportional to how much money you dole out to the collectives. I don't recall the Bill of Rights, or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms mentioning anything about monetary compensation, with respect to one's personal right to do as they choose, without violating the law. The collectives just don't seem to understand that.
In closing, I'd like to say that I have discussed this situation with the EFF, EFC, two lawyers (one who specializes in copyright law), the Copyright Board of Canada and people on the internet who just view this action by the collectives, as just plain wrong. If the final negotiated tariff is unreasonable, I will do everything in my power to attempt to abrogate it. Please, if you're Canadian, sign this online petition. 23,360 people already have, which is more than proportional to the 45,000 or so Americans who expressed their dissatisfaction to the "Know Your Banker" scheme, which was abolished a number of months ago as a result. I expect nothing less here.
Hello all. This "levy" is plagued with two very serious problems. First off, not enough terms in Bill C-32 are sufficiently defined, so that no doubts can be cast on their meanings. This creates many problems for the correct implementation for the passed laws. For instance, the terms "digital audio" and "digital audio recording media" are defined nowhere in the Canadian Copyright Act. What is digital audio? Is it compressed/uncompressed? What digital format(s) would qualify it as digital audio? As it has been stated many times in this forum, mp3 compression allows for a normal 74 minute CD-R to hold over 800 minutes of digital audio. If you wanted to impose a levy of 25 cents per every 15 minutes of this kind of digital audio, the total would come out to nearly $27 per CD-R. This kind of monstrosity is possible with the existing wording of this amendment to our Copyright Act. What is a digital audio recording medium? Are we talking about CD-R's here, or hard drives, or DAT tapes, or all of the above? If this levy is to be applied to all digital audio recording media, it really should be applied to all of the above types of media. Otherwise the law bears no logical format. Second of all, this amendment to our Copyright Act makes some automatic assumptions, with respect to the "digital audio recording media" in question: a) All media will be used solely for the purposes of recording audio. b) All media will contain copyrighted material, which is being infringed upon by the individual performing the recording. c) All media will contain material copyrighted by only Canadian artists. Those are some very dangerous and fallable assumptions to make. I don't think I even need to state that a only certain percentage of such media is used to hold any kind of digital audio recordings and that such recordings are mostly of foreign (read: non-Canadian) content. Let me play with this concept for a minute. Let's suppose that, say, a conservative 20% of all actual recorded material on the CD-R medium alone was of Canadian copyrighted material. Wouldn't an American organization like the RIAA be perfectly within their rights to demand 70-80% of the total levy imposed by the copyright collective? And this supposition of mine rests on the assumption that ALL CD-R media is used solely for recording copywritten digital audio. If you assume that roughly half of all CD-R media is used for recording copyrighted digital audio, then the collectives might have a right to collect a rough figure of 10% of their original levy. A final levy of $2.50 per CD-R, automatically becomes something closer to $0.25. That's the way I formulate this levy anyway, in my own mind. We've had tradewars with the US before and I see this as no different. I'd like to say that as a Canadian, I would not like to see this levy hold up, mainly because it will set such a dangerous precedent. I mean, what will be next? Will a levy of 10 cents per each sheet of paper be implemented, simply because each sheet can potentially be used to infringe upon copywritten Canadian literature? Will a levy of 50 cents per each inch of any knife sold be implemented because people can potentially be stabbed with any knife and the victims must be justly compensated? Will internet subscribers, particular users of broadband services, be forced to cough up some more money because they may or may not be infringing upon Canadian copyrighted material on the internet? Anyway, I think you all get my point. The floodgates will be opened if this levy is allowed to be implemented. Certain terms are not clearly defined and the wording appears to indicate that this levy was not well thought out to begin with. The collectives should go back to the drawing board and conceive a levy which is fair- something that Canadians will accept. This one is thoroughly ridiculous and people know it. Under the legacy of the collectives, your freedom to record material you purchased, or you created is proportional to how much money you dole out to the collectives. I don't recall the Bill of Rights, or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms mentioning anything about monetary compensation, with respect to one's personal right to do as they choose, without violating the law. The collectives just don't seem to understand that. In closing, I'd like to say that I have discussed this situation with the EFF, EFC, two lawyers (one who specializes in copyright law), the Copyright Board of Canada and people on the internet who just view this action by the collectives, as just plain wrong. If the final negotiated tariff is unreasonable, I will do everything in my power to attempt to abrogate it. Please, if you're Canadian, sign this online petition. 23,360 people already have, which is more than proportional to the 45,000 or so Americans who expressed their dissatisfaction to the "Know Your Banker" scheme, which was abolished a number of months ago as a result. I expect nothing less here.
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It took 220 years- from 1776 until 1996- for the US Treasury to ink $5 trillion worth of debt.
It took the Obama administration and an obsequious Congress less than 4 years to ink $5 trillion worth of debt.
Any questions?
p.s. those dollar figures are inflation-adjusted
In the Weimar Republic, inflation served to drive wealth towards real assets and therefore towards those who produced such assets. This effected a recovery - a "re-inflation" - of the German manufacturing sector. Then, once hyperinflation had done its job, they created a new currency based on debt issued by a land bank and backed by real assets. Yes, they could have done this without hurting workers so badly, if they had had superior social insurance.
Oh yes, absolutely! If only the National Socialists had come to power earlier. They would have provided social insurance for all of the German workers. Especially government workers. And especially the military. Then the hyperinflation would have been good. All because the Reichsbank would have printed even more money in order for people to redeem their insurance.
I feel so stupid that you came up with such a brilliant solution before me!
There is no question at all that synthetic antibacterial substances, often added to consumer products, will directly breed resistant bacteria.
As one ubiquitous example, please research triclosan's effects on bacterial biology, as well as its environmental impact. Triclosan will degrade into dioxin and other carcinogens when exposed to sunlight. The proof is in the pudding.
Lastly, even if there were such a synthetic additive which somehow did not potentiate microbial resistance, it would still likely add to our constant daily bombardment of carcinogens.
Trading short term pathology for a longer term pathology, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually to deal with, is not a very wise public health strategy. There are no short cuts.
...the US Constitution.
The writer of this article, Eric Lichtblau, won a shared Pulitzer Prize for his work in exposing the illegal warrantless wiretapping program, authorized by the government and championed by the White House after 9/11. In fact, it was in existence even before 9/11, but that's another story entirely.
This program supposedly expired just yesterday when congress let the clock run out on its dependent legislation. The problem here, clearly, is that it doesn't matter if this program is never renewed; overproduction of data under FISA will still happen all the time. That's the entire point of this article. There are no checks and balances. There is no accountability. There is NOTHING. Total secrecy and legal immunity are all but guaranteed for the perpetrators. Period.
So, unless these lovers of free speech, the free market and freedom in general can somehow connect "the terrorists" or "the kiddie porn traffickers" with file sharing and scare this legislation into being, this is going absolutely nowhere. The politicians can say they tried, though.
[*Go easy on me, guys! I haven't posted here in ages, so please don't mod this into Hades.]
Exactly. This retarded legislation will never make it past the Senate. The Conservatives are bitching about bills that STILL haven't been passed by the upper house after languishing in there for over a year. Without Senate and Supreme Court support, Harper has no real power. Just as it should be. :) *knock wood*
http://www.sycorp.com/petition.htm
This petition influenced the outcome of the last blank recording media levy here in Canada. You'd do well to sign it now and get as many people as you know to sign it.
I strongly advise anyone even considering getting even remotely involved with options, to visit the Chicago Board Options Exchange's basic education page. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange also has the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options available on its site. Most people simply don't understand what they are getting into with options. Although options on equity securities can potentially lead to tremendous payouts, particularly at the height of the largest bull market in history, they can much more easily turn out to be completely worthless. If you don't take the time to understand the inherent risks of options trading, you deserve to get burned at some point in the future.
This is just a lone opinion, but remember back when the MCI-Worldcom deal was on the table? Regulators were jittery from the outset because they knew that without a proper divestiture of MCI's internet assets before the merger close, the combined company would end up controlling more than 70% of the backbone business.
I think about this latest proposal the same way. You have one company in control of two major backbones (UUNET and Sprint), not to mention their own service, ONNet. I would venture to guess that this combined company would control a minimum 60% of the backbone biz, without any divestiture of Sprint's internet business. That just isn't gonna happen, folks. I can't see another large backbone being spun off like MCI's infrastructure was to Cable and Wireless. I know a lot of you will probably see this differently, but that's my take...
A clarification of the first statement: the CRTC does not force Bell, or anyone else, to use PPP over Ethernet to provision third party access to any broadband infrastructure. I know that you didn't say that they did, but there must be no confusion as to what the CRTC's role in this is.
Bell would certainly like you to believe that they were unfairly forced to open up their infrastructure to competitors and that the only way to provision that access was through PPPoE, but it simply isn't true. Basically no one, but Bell themselves, are in favour of provisioning open access via the PPPoE encapsulation- not the CAIP, not the CCTA and certainly not the end-user.
PPPoE is basically alpha, with respect to driver development right now, it's as proprietary as can be, it provides absolutely no benefits for the end-user and, in my own opinion, has no business being in the Sympatico HSE service, in Ontario and Quebec.
Finally, a topic I know a little about ;)
/. wants me to write up a more detailed analysis of PPPoE for all to see, please give me a shout and I'll be more than happy to oblige.
:P), for cutting through all the bullshit and propaganda that's peddled on a daily basis nowadays. The time for action against corporate apathy for individual consumers, has come. Just the very thought that a totally free operating system like Linux, will one day overtake the most widely used product of a corporate behemoth like MS, gives me a truckload of hope for the future. My only hope is that some of the creative power behind the open source effort, spills into the domain of broadband services and the rest of the telecom world.
First, some background info: since the beginning of the year, I've been involved with a consumer's telecommunications organization, the Rogers @Home User's Association. We are a collection of about 500 users of the Rogers@Home internet service, based in both the Ontario and British Columbia provinces in Canada. I serve as their technical director and liaison to management.
What do we do and why do we exist? We formed out of necessity. The entire service had literally collapsed under its own weight, back in December. All of our circuits going to the @Home Network in the US, were completely oversaturated. This had the effect of raising minimum network latency during peak hours, to an excess of 400, 500 and even 600 milliseconds. People were extremely angry, technical support could offer no help, hold times were a minimum of 30 minutes and management would not admit that anything was wrong. Hell, management was thoroughly incommunicado. That entire mess lasted six weeks before it was corrected in the middle of December.
I went to the CRTC, our equivalent of the American FCC, and complained bitterly. They proved to be more technically inept than I had ever dreamed of and didn't want to touch the issue with a 10 foot pole. I went to other industry officials, but nothing seemed to help.
Fast forward to February- after many of my comments in the various related newsgroups, a successful petition of angry subscribers, the threat of legal action and the RHUA right there in the thick of things, I received a call from the General Manager of Rogers Cablesystems (parent to Rogers@Home), of the Greater Toronto Area. Seeing as Rogers is the largest cable operator (MSO) in all of Canada, I was a little stunned that I would receive a call from someone so high up in the company. He was interested in setting up a meeting between senior management and I, to discuss the various problems with the service. Over the next few months, two meetings took place, the results of which can both be viewed here.
Now I'm not going to say that the results were very encouraging, but I will say that this whole process has been a step in the right direction. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other consumers groups in the sphere of telecommunications who have direct lines of communication to the senior management of their respective service(s). Due to these open channels of communication between me, our other regional reps and management, some users experiencing serious problems, were able to receive attention a lot sooner than they normally would have. The RHUA is continuing its efforts to hold management accountable for any problems that affect this service and to ensure that the needs of our subscribers are tended to quickly and efficiently.
Now, what the hell does any of this have to do with third party access to the various broadband infrastructures? Well, I've been dealing with the management of my service long enough to know that they, along with every other MSO out there, won't take this newest CRTC ruling lying down and they have the power to see their will through. Open access to the coaxial broadband infrastructure was ordered way back in 1996! Today we're in the same, damned place as we were back then. I don't think this ruling is likely to change anything in the near term. Rogers has revealed a target date of mid-2000 for the provisioning of their service to third party ISP's. Another thing I learned from my management meetings is that MSO's are definitely NOT very good at following target dates. As I have no faith in the CRTC to see their ruling through, God Only Knows (tm) when we'll see any real movement on this issue.
As per my subject of this posts, there are a great deal many details that have yet to be ironed out in order for the CRTC's ruling to be followed. In my opinion, they've barely even started yet. This document contains the recent CRTC decision that has been referenced by our press as of yesterday. Here is another URL that contains basically all the related links to CRTC rulings on broadband internet access. Of particular note is the Canadian Cable Television Association's technical report on providing third party access to the coaxial infrastructure. Be warned that this link is to a dreaded Micros~1 Word 97 Document, but the information contained therein is extremely interesting and critically important, IMHO. The methods for actually provisioning third party access are outlined and briefly discussed.
This aspect is more significant than most people realize. Anyone who is familiar with techologies favouring the PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) encapsulation, will clue in to what I'm talking about here. To make a long story short, PPPoE was developed with third party access to the broadband infrastructures in mind (particularly DSL-related access methods). The scary thing about this technology is that it does not benefit the consumer- not in the slightest. It contains network management features that can only benefit the service providers, themselves. The features are- again, in my opinion- inherently oppressive to all consumers of these broadband services. They are designed to usurp power from users of broadband services, into the hands of their providers. Features include isolating each user's traffic into a "virtual circuit", completely dynamic IP addressing from designated address pools, point and click network monitoring, and a point and click user disconnection option, among many others. I quoted the virtual circuit term above because VC's are traditionally supposed to provide some enhanced reliability, but PPPoE does nothing of the sort.
Basically, if you're worried about CALEA, your online privacy and security, your consumer rights, or anything else that's related to your electronic freedom, be sure to check your concerns at the door in a PPPoE-enabled world. This technology puts way too much power in the hands of individual providers who will be free to do as they choose with it. Snooping on your online communications will be a cinch, as the virtual circuit ID is all that must be isolated for a party to easily see everything you're doing. I don't think I need to explain any further implications of this technology. The sad reality is that I feel that government regulation of broadband services will have to be implemented, in order to curb the abuses of service providers at some point in the future. And as we all know, regulation is definitely not the way to go.
I brought this all up because AOL and GTE specifically used PPPoE hardware, manufactured by Redback Networks, to provision third party access to GTE's coaxial infrastructure. Although I'm betting that PPPoE will not be implemented for open access to the coax infrastructure up here, I AM worried that a different scenario will unfold in the US. I think that every possible step must be taken to prevent PPPoE from being used to provision third party access to any and all broadband infrastructures in the US. This technology has already surreptitiously found its way into several consumer DSL markets out there, both in the US and in Canada, but it must not be permitted to come to cable.
I'm not against Redback Networks, UUNET, AOL, or any other proponents of the very proprietary PPPoE technology; it's just that unless I see any clearcut benefits to consumers out there and my doubts are confirmed by more and more existing and future broadband users, I will personally do all that I can to spread the word about PPP over Ethernet and its implications. One thing I'd really like to see, is someone like Bruce Schneier, and/or an organization like L0pht, go over this technology with a fine tooth comb and tear it to pieces. I have yet to read a critique of its supposed "security features".
On that note, if someone at
To finish up here (you're all sighing with relief, I know), I want to say a few last things. First of all, some additional consumer groups must sprout up in the US and Canada, to pay attention to these serious developments and to protect the rights of their constituents. From what I have been able to tell thus far, there just aren't enough people who are willing to stand up and fight for their rights in an organizational manner. I have pushed and pushed for the formation of a Cox @Home user's group, but the main proponent of this idea has told me on numerous occasions that people just aren't angry enough with their service to do anything about it. And this after being well aware that Cox will implement further upstream rate caps of 128 Kbps, with NO proportional reductions in the monthly fees that subscribers pay. This is downright criminal, the way I see it and is something that's totally unjustifiable. Our upstream rates have remained at 400 Kbps because our objections to the cap were voiced very loudly, very early into the process. Purveyors of broadband services will do as they please unless they answer to a consumer authority.
Second, as the CRTC is technically clueless and toothless, with respect to consumer advocacy, our whole situation over here is in limbo, in my own view. I truly hope that American MSO's and, more importantly, American citizens interested in broadband access, observe our progress here and learn what works and what doesn't, from our successes and failures. If all goes well, the RHUA and I might have a hand in seeing how third party access is provisioned to the existing coax infrastructure.
Last but not least, we need to see management become more accountable for the products and services they provide to ordinary consumers. Good customer service is a very difficult thing to find nowadays, with respect to individual consumers. The quality of customer service you receive should not be proportional to the size of your wallet, or the pull of your company. Cable companies providing broadband services, are simply not using the very medium they are selling, to reach their customers. People feel totally left out and unappreciated by the purveyors, and they have every right to feel that way. When someone wants to complain about poor service, or voice their concerns about a related issue, they often must wade through a thick veil of bureacracy to get even the most meager of results. It has been bad- and still is bad- for users of my internet service and as terrible as that may seem, broadband subscribers south of the border have it even worse. This has got to stop now! I've always maintained the highest respect for Slashdot and sites like it (okay, there are no others like it
-Chris Weisdorf
I just wanted to clarify the above information. Congress specifically passed and modified the patent laws so that software (applications, OSes and everything in between) would be considered assets. That's really the key word here. Assets, like the above author said, are grouped with mechanical processes, or even more specifically, material processes and objects. They are traditionally supposed to be tangible and concrete, held in check by the laws of Newtonian physics. This ruling naturally shook things up to hell from that standpoint.
:/
So what's the big deal about assets? What you have to realize is that corporations (as opposed to just unnamed groups of people, or individuals) exist to get certain benefits, i.e. for tax breaks/shelters, to facilitate easier growth of capital, etc., etc. One big benefit to a corporate entity is to declare their material ownings as these assets and then have those assets amortize (become liquidated over time) and depreciate (become devalued over time) so they can write all of that off against their taxes. See where I'm going with this?
This alteration greatly helped out corporations that are heavily dependent on software, especially very expensive software. They buy all of this costly stuff, declare it as an asset and then write it all off. Sure, Microsoft likes it because they know other corporations will buy more of their product, eager to write it all off. It's a pretty tidy arrangement for them.
In my own opinion, I feel that this ruling is likely to hurt the growth of open source and free software in the business sector because many corporations will be happier to spend on their software and write it off, rather than just adopt software that costs little, if anything at all. In countries where corporations are hit harder by taxes, you'll probably see even more of the corporate base invest in costly (or at least costlier) software...
Heya, the Internet Council of Registrars can probably be of some use to you. Take a look at this page on CORE's site for a list of registrars accredited by ICANN. They're pretty scant on details (big surprise) with respect to domain transfers, so I'll give you a few tips: Joker.com has the cheapest rates of them all, followed by Firstdomain.net; both are German setups. Casdns.net charges basically the same rates as good ole NSI, but they happen to be the only registrar that actually has any information on domain name transfers. They say that you are able to transfer domain names from any other accredited registrar and pay $35 per year to maintain the existing domain(s). That information in itself is ambiguous and I'm reluctant to be the guinea pig to transfer my domain from NSI to one of these registrars. Of course I'll be transferring my domain over in a few months when I get my letter of harrassment from NSI ;). One of these days I may get around to e-mailing some of the registrars, if clear information on this topic doesn't become available soon. In the meantime I'll wait for someone with an expired domain name to step up and test their luck. Good luck (hint, hint :P)...
Yep, it's primarily about those three things, in my own personal opinion. During the past couple of years or so, I've often wondered why a Discman-like portable CD player that can play both mp3's and regular CD's, hasn't been brought to market. I even thought quite a bit about building one myself, although I never had the engineering experience to get it off the ground.
Regarding the hardware issue, up until around 18 months ago, it just wasn't very cost effective for most large corporate entities to build a portable device that could do real time, or near-real time audio decompression. A powerful enough DSP, like something out of the Motorola 56300 series, was just too costly to develop a consumer product upon. This is probably the least significant impediment of the three, as consumer technologies will be produced that are outside the domain of the average consumer (HDTV anyone?), nevertheless it was a logical impediment at one time.
Eventually, though, the MPMan and the Diamond Rio were produced, albeit for some comparatively hefty prices. The production of the MPMan probably was of some concern to the various parties "protecting" the rights of artists, but the Rio was really what frightened them. Diamond Multimedia, a fairly large consumer electronics firm, was encroaching upon their interests, so the RIAA took them on in court. We all know what happened. Diamond set legal precedent, but drew some obvious ire from the recording industry by doing so. Since then, Diamond jumped on to the SDMI corporate bandwagon, to make nice with the RIAA and only one other consumer electronics firm- Creative Labs- has brought out a competing product. What about Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp and all the other large electronics corporations out there; why haven't they come out with any competing products? Well, one of the main reasons is that a lot of these companies have direct interests within the recording industry. Sony, as we all know, owns a record company. Others are either investors in record companies, or they believe that they stand to lose much from a falling out with the establishment.
Imagine that you're the CEO of one of these corporations. Do you really want to risk getting blacklisted by the recording companies and by doing so, risk investor confidence in your company's stock? I really don't think so. These large companies like certainty. It pays to protect the status quo, especially if you hold all the cards. Bringing out a product that has the ability to play 150 songs on one, lone CD-R, will turn that status quo on its ear. In some places, like in my country, the recording industry has lobbied the government to impose ridiculous taxes on blank audio recording media. It isn't in their best interests for you to be able to hold that many songs on one CD-R. They will do everything in their power to thwart innovation if they stand to lose anything from the introduction of a new technology, such as mp3.
A smaller firm will have to develop a CD-based player on their own and successfully market it to the public. I'm not talking about Pine's offering, but rather, something from a larger, more established company. Until then, however, a device like this will be hard to come by and it will remain comparatively expensive. It will also obviously be looked upon as a device solely for music pirates by the recording industry, as the sheer volume of compressed music that can be fit onto one CD-R, must scare the hell out of them. They've never liked consumers being able to record their own music, so any sort of compressed audio that empowers the consumer, will compound their fears.
One final thing to consider is that such a device can only possibly appeal to people with access to a CD-R recorder. Right now that market really isn't very large when compared with the amount of people who already own some sort of regular CD player. A corporation might argue that a legitimate market for a portable audio device that'll play mp3's off of a CD-R, just isn't there yet. You can't present that argument for devices that make use of non-volatile solid state memory, as they don't require anything other than a PC and a free parallel port, or some other interface, to facilitate data transfer. This is just a lot more convenient for the general public at this time, who are interested in listening to mp3's away from their computer. I would just love to be able to play mp3 CD-R's on my Sony Discman, as I own a CD-R burner, but you have to think about all of the people who don't have immediate access to something like this.
Sorry, I forgot that the HTML formatting wouldn't automatically add newlines for me :P
Hello all. This "levy" is plagued with two very serious problems. First off, not enough terms in Bill C-32 are sufficiently defined, so that no doubts can be cast on their meanings. This creates many problems for the correct implementation for the passed laws. For instance, the terms "digital audio" and "digital audio recording media" are defined nowhere in the Canadian Copyright Act.
What is digital audio? Is it compressed/uncompressed? What digital format(s) would qualify it as digital audio? As it has been stated many times in this forum, mp3 compression allows for a normal 74 minute CD-R to hold over 800 minutes of digital audio. If you wanted to impose a levy of 25 cents per every 15 minutes of this kind of digital audio, the total would come out to nearly $27 per CD-R. This kind of monstrosity is possible with the existing wording of this amendment to our Copyright Act.
What is a digital audio recording medium? Are we talking about CD-R's here, or hard drives, or DAT tapes, or all of the above? If this levy is to be applied to all digital audio recording media, it really should be applied to all of the above types of media. Otherwise the law bears no logical format.
Second of all, this amendment to our Copyright Act makes some automatic assumptions, with respect to the "digital audio recording media" in question:
a) All media will be used solely for the purposes of recording audio.
b) All media will contain copyrighted material, which is being infringed upon by the individual performing the recording.
c) All media will contain material copyrighted by only Canadian artists.
Those are some very dangerous and fallable assumptions to make. I don't think I even need to state that a only certain percentage of such media is used to hold any kind of digital audio recordings and that such recordings are mostly of foreign (read: non-Canadian) content. Let me play with this concept for a minute. Let's suppose that, say, a conservative 20% of all actual recorded material on the CD-R medium alone was of Canadian copyrighted material. Wouldn't an American organization like the RIAA be perfectly within their rights to demand 70-80% of the total levy imposed by the copyright collective? And this supposition of mine rests on the assumption that ALL CD-R media is used solely for recording copywritten digital audio. If you assume that roughly half of all CD-R media is used for recording copyrighted digital audio, then the collectives might have a right to collect a rough figure of 10% of their original levy. A final levy of $2.50 per CD-R, automatically becomes something closer to $0.25. That's the way I formulate this levy anyway, in my own mind. We've had tradewars with the US before and I see this as no different.
I'd like to say that as a Canadian, I would not like to see this levy hold up, mainly because it will set such a dangerous precedent. I mean, what will be next? Will a levy of 10 cents per each sheet of paper be implemented, simply because each sheet can potentially be used to infringe upon copywritten Canadian literature? Will a levy of 50 cents per each inch of any knife sold be implemented because people can potentially be stabbed with any knife and the victims must be justly compensated? Will internet subscribers, particular users of broadband services, be forced to cough up some more money because they may or may not be infringing upon Canadian copyrighted material on the internet?
Anyway, I think you all get my point. The floodgates will be opened if this levy is allowed to be implemented. Certain terms are not clearly defined and the wording appears to indicate that this levy was not well thought out to begin with. The collectives should go back to the drawing board and conceive a levy which is fair- something that Canadians will accept. This one is thoroughly ridiculous and people know it. Under the legacy of the collectives, your freedom to record material you purchased, or you created is proportional to how much money you dole out to the collectives. I don't recall the Bill of Rights, or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms mentioning anything about monetary compensation, with respect to one's personal right to do as they choose, without violating the law. The collectives just don't seem to understand that.
In closing, I'd like to say that I have discussed this situation with the EFF, EFC, two lawyers (one who specializes in copyright law), the Copyright Board of Canada and people on the internet who just view this action by the collectives, as just plain wrong. If the final negotiated tariff is unreasonable, I will do everything in my power to attempt to abrogate it. Please, if you're Canadian, sign this online petition. 23,360 people already have, which is more than proportional to the 45,000 or so Americans who expressed their dissatisfaction to the "Know Your Banker" scheme, which was abolished a number of months ago as a result. I expect nothing less here.
Hello all. This "levy" is plagued with two very serious problems. First off, not enough terms in Bill C-32 are sufficiently defined, so that no doubts can be cast on their meanings. This creates many problems for the correct implementation for the passed laws. For instance, the terms "digital audio" and "digital audio recording media" are defined nowhere in the Canadian Copyright Act. What is digital audio? Is it compressed/uncompressed? What digital format(s) would qualify it as digital audio? As it has been stated many times in this forum, mp3 compression allows for a normal 74 minute CD-R to hold over 800 minutes of digital audio. If you wanted to impose a levy of 25 cents per every 15 minutes of this kind of digital audio, the total would come out to nearly $27 per CD-R. This kind of monstrosity is possible with the existing wording of this amendment to our Copyright Act. What is a digital audio recording medium? Are we talking about CD-R's here, or hard drives, or DAT tapes, or all of the above? If this levy is to be applied to all digital audio recording media, it really should be applied to all of the above types of media. Otherwise the law bears no logical format. Second of all, this amendment to our Copyright Act makes some automatic assumptions, with respect to the "digital audio recording media" in question: a) All media will be used solely for the purposes of recording audio. b) All media will contain copyrighted material, which is being infringed upon by the individual performing the recording. c) All media will contain material copyrighted by only Canadian artists. Those are some very dangerous and fallable assumptions to make. I don't think I even need to state that a only certain percentage of such media is used to hold any kind of digital audio recordings and that such recordings are mostly of foreign (read: non-Canadian) content. Let me play with this concept for a minute. Let's suppose that, say, a conservative 20% of all actual recorded material on the CD-R medium alone was of Canadian copyrighted material. Wouldn't an American organization like the RIAA be perfectly within their rights to demand 70-80% of the total levy imposed by the copyright collective? And this supposition of mine rests on the assumption that ALL CD-R media is used solely for recording copywritten digital audio. If you assume that roughly half of all CD-R media is used for recording copyrighted digital audio, then the collectives might have a right to collect a rough figure of 10% of their original levy. A final levy of $2.50 per CD-R, automatically becomes something closer to $0.25. That's the way I formulate this levy anyway, in my own mind. We've had tradewars with the US before and I see this as no different. I'd like to say that as a Canadian, I would not like to see this levy hold up, mainly because it will set such a dangerous precedent. I mean, what will be next? Will a levy of 10 cents per each sheet of paper be implemented, simply because each sheet can potentially be used to infringe upon copywritten Canadian literature? Will a levy of 50 cents per each inch of any knife sold be implemented because people can potentially be stabbed with any knife and the victims must be justly compensated? Will internet subscribers, particular users of broadband services, be forced to cough up some more money because they may or may not be infringing upon Canadian copyrighted material on the internet? Anyway, I think you all get my point. The floodgates will be opened if this levy is allowed to be implemented. Certain terms are not clearly defined and the wording appears to indicate that this levy was not well thought out to begin with. The collectives should go back to the drawing board and conceive a levy which is fair- something that Canadians will accept. This one is thoroughly ridiculous and people know it. Under the legacy of the collectives, your freedom to record material you purchased, or you created is proportional to how much money you dole out to the collectives. I don't recall the Bill of Rights, or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms mentioning anything about monetary compensation, with respect to one's personal right to do as they choose, without violating the law. The collectives just don't seem to understand that. In closing, I'd like to say that I have discussed this situation with the EFF, EFC, two lawyers (one who specializes in copyright law), the Copyright Board of Canada and people on the internet who just view this action by the collectives, as just plain wrong. If the final negotiated tariff is unreasonable, I will do everything in my power to attempt to abrogate it. Please, if you're Canadian, sign this online petition. 23,360 people already have, which is more than proportional to the 45,000 or so Americans who expressed their dissatisfaction to the "Know Your Banker" scheme, which was abolished a number of months ago as a result. I expect nothing less here.