What happens if I, a Canuck, go to make a personal copy (prefectly legal in Canada) and the OS filters the output? I wouldn't put up with someone interfering with my RIGHT to make personal copies. Overarching copyright filtering could lead to some interesting litigation in various jurisdictions.
It isn't punishing law abiding citizens but giving them the right to make copies of music purchased on-line if they choose to do so. Do you really think the recording industry is happy with the notion someone can purchase their music and them make a copy for their friend without violating Canadian copyright law? Well, they can and that makes the CRIA\RIAA very unhappy which is just the way I like 'em.
That might be the case if it weren't for the fact that record labels are against it. The tax allows copying. Any copying. That means you could download music from a store and share the music with friends and family without worrying about being sued for it. The record companies don't want that. They want your right to copy restricted to their terms. This law undermines that.
No, that's not what they are doing at all. The purpose of the levies is to ALLOW personal copying. That means the Copyright Board looks at copyright as a "right to copy". If a levy is placed on on-line music downloads that will mean you can copy the songs and play them in your car without having to worry about the copy being illegal. It wouldn't be. All of this is the result of a court ruling a few years ago which made downloading music from Kaza or bittorrent perfectly legal and the levies are a way of dealing with the reality of a digital age. It's enlightened even. Here is the ruling and a backgrounder:
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/03/31/canada/download_court040331http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/internet/downloading_music.html
You can apply for an exemption or import the media from the states. We distributed some Linux CDs to local students to try out and getting the exemption was pretty easy reducing the cost by quite a bit. But most folks who buy a 50 spindle of CDs are going to copy music onto some of them at least.
The thing is no one is stealing or breaking any laws to begin with. In Canada it is legal to post files to and retrieve files from a shared directory. It is also legal to copy music to levied media. Finally, it is not illegal to download music for personal use. The use of the word piracy by the Copyright Board spokesperson was unfortunate and misleading.
Yes, you are exactly right. I'm not too happy with the spokesperson the copyright board used for this annoucement because the did a very bad job of explaining exactly what is meant by "copying" in Canada. As you say, copying music to levied media is not piracy but legal copying and the levy on on-line music would allow the copying of downloaded files more than once. Giving a copy to your mom for example. However, DRM routines may make most downloads not easily copied anyway but might make an interesting court case should someone purchase levied music on-line and discover the files are altered in a manner that prohibits or makes very difficult legal copying. Legal copying they have paid for. Could get interesting.
The music labels are against it because the tax (not really a tax but a levy for copyright holders) would allow a person to legally copy a file downloaded from an on-line music store more than once and even give a copy to a friend. In fact, they are so pissed at our levy system they have refused to collect billions in media levies. No conspiracy.
Yes, you are right. It's the same in Canada as the States. Your Constitution probits that sort of thing and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms does the same. They will have to rethink that part of it because it would be a slam dunk for the retailers in court.
The levy is collected on behalf of the copyright holders and the levy gives you "the right" to copy if you choose to do so. If a company or library or even individual wants to escape the levy because the media will be used for other purposes they can simply import the media from the States or wherever and not pay the levy. The tax on a song purchased on line (a levy) would give the downloader the right to copy the file (more than once) to disc or MP3 player.
In theory there is no reason to DRM music in the Canadian market as copying is legal when a levy is paid on media and downloaded music from on-line stores would also be legal to copy hence the tax. It's a case of a much larger country having Draconian copyright laws while a smaller neighbour goes at the issue in an entirely different way. Obviously, American labels aren't about to make an easy to copy version for the Canadian market.
Does nothing of the sort and only raqtionalises the already existing media levy. I doubt retroactive payment can be applied as the Charter and the Supreme Court frown on that sort of thing. Nevertheless, it isn't that big of a deal either way. Awkward at the begining I suppose. When a Canadian downloads a music file and burns it to media which has had the media levy paid it is NOT piracy but legal copying.
I have doubts that image files could be screened in bulk for such things. More often than not it will simply appear that a.jpg, for example, has garbaged EXIF data. There are BILLIONS of photos posted on the internet with garbage data in them. One has to catch the file on someones computer and, if they are smart, that data won't be on the hard drive more than a few seconds before it is transfered to a tiny USB key and the data on the hard drive securely erased. However it is overreaching to expect to hide one picture inside of another and not have an obvious file size issue. Things like user names and paswords, credit card info and so on are better suited for the task. Is anyone really going to notice that a 174 KB JPEG has 10 or 20 KB of garbage in it? I doubt it. But, half again as big to accomodate a photo would be pretty obvious.
The viewer or reciever doesn't need to have a constantly updated password. They just need to know, say, a half dozen file names and passwords in advance, maybe years in advance, and try them against the image. It is trivially easy to hide a hashed text file in a compressed image file and it doesn't take special software to do it. A simple HEX editor is enough. It's pretty easy to detect but it wouldn't matter if the text data is hashed with strong encryption. There is a misconception that important data must be large to be worthwhile. 20 to 30 KB of text is one heck of a lot of data if it contains, say, user names and passwords and that's pretty easy to hash and then compress to 8 or 12 KB. So, yes, compressed image files are a pretty good carrier and can be used effectively when preparations are made well in advance. There is no such animal as invisible stenography. It's going to be dead obvious something is going on the instant the file is "HEXed" but the hashed data still has to be decrypted. Obsfucation and encryption - no reason for that not to work and work well.
It won't have any effect at all. The DOE strictly controls the flow of Canadian oil. They say it's done to "protect domestic suppliers" but, in fact, it is done to control the price. Canada has 1.5 times more capacity than what we ship so, in theory, we could more than double our exports to the U.S. and the price would drop. We wouldn't ship so much that the price fell below $56.00 U.S. a barrel because tar sands extraction requires that price to be profitable. Still, we could knock ten or fifteen dollars off the price of a barrel effortlessly. Of course, the DOE will have none of it. Conversely, there is an up side to that: bitumen is really nasty stuff and it's probably just as well we have an artificial limit placed on how much of it we can sell. So, don't expect the price at the pump to take any dramatic drop except during the next presidential campaign. Maybe.
Not millions. Politicians are notoriously cheap to buy. A couple of expenses paid junkets and a vague offer of a position with the firm when the politician leaves office is generally more than enough.
Its quite a bit more than a tempest in a teapot. Yes, the amount of pollution from that single plant isn't that huge but, what about the other refineries? They're going to come looking for exemptions too. Indiana will not be able to deny them because, if the do, the refineries are going to sue claiming that the state government can't favour one refinery over another and that they're creating an anti-competitive enviroment. Which would be true. So, it's just the begining.
I don't know if it is avoidable but it should be. The steam for injection is generated using natural gas which is essentially free because we have an ocean of the stuff we can't even give away. Although economical at the current price, the enviromental cost is huge. Canada produces more CO2 than any other western industrialised nation and it's getting worse as tar sands production ramps up. Our capacity will triple by 2015 and the Alberta Enviroment Ministry estimates there are currently 300 years worth of production at double our current output. That's just scary.
The U.S Departmant Of Energy regulates how much oil and of what type we are allowed to sell to America. Canada has very little say because the U.S. is our only customer. Our capacity is already 1.5 times greater than our output.
The recording industry, whether intentionally or not, handily defeated copying for decades without relying on any restrictions. The vynil album survived highly capable reel to reel tape recorders and dirt cheap cassette tapes only becoming obsolete for mass distribution when the studios themselves pulled them for CD. How did they do it? Simple: record albums were beautiful. You had a cover large enough to frame and often posters, booklets and glossy photos inside the cover. People really, really wanted them and not just for the music they contained. People love pretty things they can hold. It's a funny old world, innit?
I think the point of that is there is always a fundamental fallback point with analog. As digital signals are just indecypherable garbage to humans as the signal has to be converted to analog at some point the "hole" will always exist. Also, analog is pretty darn good. If you take a high quality VHS tape and put it into a high quality VHS player you will enjoy the movie.
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The money is held in an escrow account managed by the Copyright Board.
What happens if I, a Canuck, go to make a personal copy (prefectly legal in Canada) and the OS filters the output? I wouldn't put up with someone interfering with my RIGHT to make personal copies. Overarching copyright filtering could lead to some interesting litigation in various jurisdictions.
It isn't punishing law abiding citizens but giving them the right to make copies of music purchased on-line if they choose to do so. Do you really think the recording industry is happy with the notion someone can purchase their music and them make a copy for their friend without violating Canadian copyright law? Well, they can and that makes the CRIA\RIAA very unhappy which is just the way I like 'em.
That might be the case if it weren't for the fact that record labels are against it. The tax allows copying. Any copying. That means you could download music from a store and share the music with friends and family without worrying about being sued for it. The record companies don't want that. They want your right to copy restricted to their terms. This law undermines that.
No, that's not what they are doing at all. The purpose of the levies is to ALLOW personal copying. That means the Copyright Board looks at copyright as a "right to copy". If a levy is placed on on-line music downloads that will mean you can copy the songs and play them in your car without having to worry about the copy being illegal. It wouldn't be. All of this is the result of a court ruling a few years ago which made downloading music from Kaza or bittorrent perfectly legal and the levies are a way of dealing with the reality of a digital age. It's enlightened even. Here is the ruling and a backgrounder: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/03/31/canada/download_court040331 http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/internet/downloading_music.html
You can apply for an exemption or import the media from the states. We distributed some Linux CDs to local students to try out and getting the exemption was pretty easy reducing the cost by quite a bit. But most folks who buy a 50 spindle of CDs are going to copy music onto some of them at least.
The thing is no one is stealing or breaking any laws to begin with. In Canada it is legal to post files to and retrieve files from a shared directory. It is also legal to copy music to levied media. Finally, it is not illegal to download music for personal use. The use of the word piracy by the Copyright Board spokesperson was unfortunate and misleading.
Yes, you are exactly right. I'm not too happy with the spokesperson the copyright board used for this annoucement because the did a very bad job of explaining exactly what is meant by "copying" in Canada. As you say, copying music to levied media is not piracy but legal copying and the levy on on-line music would allow the copying of downloaded files more than once. Giving a copy to your mom for example. However, DRM routines may make most downloads not easily copied anyway but might make an interesting court case should someone purchase levied music on-line and discover the files are altered in a manner that prohibits or makes very difficult legal copying. Legal copying they have paid for. Could get interesting.
The music labels are against it because the tax (not really a tax but a levy for copyright holders) would allow a person to legally copy a file downloaded from an on-line music store more than once and even give a copy to a friend. In fact, they are so pissed at our levy system they have refused to collect billions in media levies. No conspiracy.
Yes, you are right. It's the same in Canada as the States. Your Constitution probits that sort of thing and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms does the same. They will have to rethink that part of it because it would be a slam dunk for the retailers in court.
I very much doubt a retroactive tax would fly in court. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits that sort of thing.
The levy is collected on behalf of the copyright holders and the levy gives you "the right" to copy if you choose to do so. If a company or library or even individual wants to escape the levy because the media will be used for other purposes they can simply import the media from the States or wherever and not pay the levy. The tax on a song purchased on line (a levy) would give the downloader the right to copy the file (more than once) to disc or MP3 player.
Interestingly, the CRIA has refused to collect the money. So, there are billions in artists money sitting uncollected.
In theory there is no reason to DRM music in the Canadian market as copying is legal when a levy is paid on media and downloaded music from on-line stores would also be legal to copy hence the tax. It's a case of a much larger country having Draconian copyright laws while a smaller neighbour goes at the issue in an entirely different way. Obviously, American labels aren't about to make an easy to copy version for the Canadian market.
Does nothing of the sort and only raqtionalises the already existing media levy. I doubt retroactive payment can be applied as the Charter and the Supreme Court frown on that sort of thing. Nevertheless, it isn't that big of a deal either way. Awkward at the begining I suppose. When a Canadian downloads a music file and burns it to media which has had the media levy paid it is NOT piracy but legal copying.
I have doubts that image files could be screened in bulk for such things. More often than not it will simply appear that a .jpg, for example, has garbaged EXIF data. There are BILLIONS of photos posted on the internet with garbage data in them. One has to catch the file on someones computer and, if they are smart, that data won't be on the hard drive more than a few seconds before it is transfered to a tiny USB key and the data on the hard drive securely erased. However it is overreaching to expect to hide one picture inside of another and not have an obvious file size issue. Things like user names and paswords, credit card info and so on are better suited for the task. Is anyone really going to notice that a 174 KB JPEG has 10 or 20 KB of garbage in it? I doubt it. But, half again as big to accomodate a photo would be pretty obvious.
A picture of a giraffe would stand out on the internet? Even a picture of a mans gaping anus doesn't stand out on the internet. *laughs*
The viewer or reciever doesn't need to have a constantly updated password. They just need to know, say, a half dozen file names and passwords in advance, maybe years in advance, and try them against the image. It is trivially easy to hide a hashed text file in a compressed image file and it doesn't take special software to do it. A simple HEX editor is enough. It's pretty easy to detect but it wouldn't matter if the text data is hashed with strong encryption. There is a misconception that important data must be large to be worthwhile. 20 to 30 KB of text is one heck of a lot of data if it contains, say, user names and passwords and that's pretty easy to hash and then compress to 8 or 12 KB. So, yes, compressed image files are a pretty good carrier and can be used effectively when preparations are made well in advance. There is no such animal as invisible stenography. It's going to be dead obvious something is going on the instant the file is "HEXed" but the hashed data still has to be decrypted. Obsfucation and encryption - no reason for that not to work and work well.
It won't have any effect at all. The DOE strictly controls the flow of Canadian oil. They say it's done to "protect domestic suppliers" but, in fact, it is done to control the price. Canada has 1.5 times more capacity than what we ship so, in theory, we could more than double our exports to the U.S. and the price would drop. We wouldn't ship so much that the price fell below $56.00 U.S. a barrel because tar sands extraction requires that price to be profitable. Still, we could knock ten or fifteen dollars off the price of a barrel effortlessly. Of course, the DOE will have none of it. Conversely, there is an up side to that: bitumen is really nasty stuff and it's probably just as well we have an artificial limit placed on how much of it we can sell. So, don't expect the price at the pump to take any dramatic drop except during the next presidential campaign. Maybe.
Not millions. Politicians are notoriously cheap to buy. A couple of expenses paid junkets and a vague offer of a position with the firm when the politician leaves office is generally more than enough.
Its quite a bit more than a tempest in a teapot. Yes, the amount of pollution from that single plant isn't that huge but, what about the other refineries? They're going to come looking for exemptions too. Indiana will not be able to deny them because, if the do, the refineries are going to sue claiming that the state government can't favour one refinery over another and that they're creating an anti-competitive enviroment. Which would be true. So, it's just the begining.
I don't know if it is avoidable but it should be. The steam for injection is generated using natural gas which is essentially free because we have an ocean of the stuff we can't even give away. Although economical at the current price, the enviromental cost is huge. Canada produces more CO2 than any other western industrialised nation and it's getting worse as tar sands production ramps up. Our capacity will triple by 2015 and the Alberta Enviroment Ministry estimates there are currently 300 years worth of production at double our current output. That's just scary.
The U.S Departmant Of Energy regulates how much oil and of what type we are allowed to sell to America. Canada has very little say because the U.S. is our only customer. Our capacity is already 1.5 times greater than our output.
The recording industry, whether intentionally or not, handily defeated copying for decades without relying on any restrictions. The vynil album survived highly capable reel to reel tape recorders and dirt cheap cassette tapes only becoming obsolete for mass distribution when the studios themselves pulled them for CD. How did they do it? Simple: record albums were beautiful. You had a cover large enough to frame and often posters, booklets and glossy photos inside the cover. People really, really wanted them and not just for the music they contained. People love pretty things they can hold. It's a funny old world, innit?
I think the point of that is there is always a fundamental fallback point with analog. As digital signals are just indecypherable garbage to humans as the signal has to be converted to analog at some point the "hole" will always exist. Also, analog is pretty darn good. If you take a high quality VHS tape and put it into a high quality VHS player you will enjoy the movie.