RCMP Won't Go After Personal Filesharers 405
mlauzon writes "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use (Google translation). Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. 'Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,' Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'"
Re:News Flash from our cute neighbors to the north (Score:5, Interesting)
totalitarianism? (Score:2, Interesting)
Selective enforcement is a tool of totalitarianism.
Maybe it's a 'good start', but ultimately the law has to be either changed of enforced.
Re:Ambivalent feelings (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the government is realizing that copyright law is outdated? It's not a fundamental right of human beings, just a tool that was used in the past to jump-start the publishing industry. How about a new model that doesn't require any enforcement, where people fully pay for the labor used to create the product, then it becomes freely available?
Maybe if we embraced the fact that copying was essentially free, we might find an even better business model which created more wealth.
Code is Law! (Score:3, Interesting)
I know how to stop it but no-one heres going to like it. Taking a page from Snow Crash where the network routers police traffic according to democratically arrived at laws, Internet protocols should be regulated in such a way that the network itself enforces distribution licenses. You download you're Linux iso's for free because thats the license in appropriate field of the Bit-Torrent 2009 protocol while material requiring payment has it automatically debited from your account on download, again depending on whats in the license field of the torrent. Regulating the network itself in a way that all licenses from free to ad-supported to subscription to purchase are enforced where it would be difficult to circumvent them (on the network not your computer) would ease issues in other areas that suck because of the lack of regulation of the network: having to put up with the likes of copy-protection on our computers and various nasties (think of the children being exploited) being filtered at the network level. The Internet is not a new phenomenom that magically facilitates people circumventing payment based licenses: before it was the SneakerNet but now that the Internet is a reality, it has become the tool of choice to distribute things beyond their intended audiences.
And just a quick word to people who think all bits should be free: If someone wants to give it away for free then more power to them *but* in our economic framework it takes effort to organize all the bits in software and you paying the publisher then them paying their employees then the employees paying their bills is a great way to spread the effort around. Entertainment is hard to make for free right now - operating systems are different, they're infrastructure and there are more obvious benefits to cooperation in them.
Re:Not possible. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ambivalent feelings (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. Canadians DO pay for it, via a levy on recording materials (blank CDs, etc) that goes back to the recording industry, so its not even "fraud."
Quite so, although it should be said that the copyright levy only covers copying of music. Copying video etc is still a problem.
Re:News Flash from our cute neighbors to the north (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unfortunately (Score:4, Interesting)
Copyright is a federal statute in Canada, which means that provincial legislatures don't have the power to change that statute. It doesn't affect the police; the Criminal Code is also a federal statute, and yet provincial and municipal police investigate murders (indictable offences) and shoplifting (summary offences) all the time.
Generally, a police officer with jurisdiction in some area of Canada can exercise his powers to enforce any law that governs that area. Of course, the Calgary city police generally aren't going to allocate their resources to investigating crime in Edmonton, for example, but if they do, it might even be considered wilful obstruction of a peace officer for the Edmonton police to interfere.
Re:The reason? (Score:2, Interesting)
TITLE: Last Saskatchewan Pirate
Well, I used to be a farmer and I made a living fine
I had a little stretch of land along the C. P. line
But times got tough, and though I tried, the money wasn't there
The bankers came and took my land and told me, "Fair is fair"
I looked for every kind of job, the answer always no
"Hire you now?" they'd always laugh, "We just let twenty go!" (Ha ha!)
The government, they promised me a measly little sum
But I've got too much pride to end up just another bum
Then I thought, who gives a damn if all the jobs are gone
I'm gonna be a pirate on the river Saskatchewan! (Arr!)
{Snip}
Well, Mountie Bob he chased me, he was always at my throat
He'd follow on the shoreline 'cause he didn't own a boat
But the cutbacks were a-comin' and the Mountie lost his job
So now he's sailing with me and we call him Salty Bob
Re:Ambivalent feelings (Score:3, Interesting)
It should also be said that only Canadian artists can receive disbursements from levies collected. That means that Canadian artists are theoretically earning revenue, indirectly, from downloads of non Canadian music.