Canadian Labour Congress Considers Reversal On IP Policy

An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Labour Congress is considering a dramatic reversal of its stance on copyright and IP policy. CLC is comparable to the US AFL-CIO, but Canada is over 30% unionized. The campaign 'we must change copyright and IP law to fight evil counterfeiters and copyright pirates' is actually succeeding in Canada. Quoting the CLC's new policy resolution: '... this critical issue requires a far-reaching response involving legislative and regulatory reform, policy change, and allocation of proper resources to combat the problems. The Canadian government must be given the structure and resources to mount a sustained attack on this pervasive problem, both within Canada and internationally. The criminal and civil laws in Canada must provide adequate deterrence. And consumers must be educated that counterfeiting and piracy are not victimless, nuisance crimes, but instead strike at the heart of our long term economic security.'"

Business unions

[delirium of disorder]

Business unions are sellouts. We need democratic industrial unions. [iww.org]

Re:Business unions

[Znork]

Unions supporting intellectual monopoly laws is also self-defeating; costs such as IP added to the economy are one of the reasons western workers have difficulty competing with lower wage countries.

IP laws are not free. Strengthening them is the macroeconomic equivalent of increasing taxation levels such as VAT (which has a similar distribution) across the economy as a whole, and as a non-progressive tax it tends to increase the cost pressure on the lower to mid income groups the most. Pretty much the same group the union members belong to.

Artist and creator compensation are important things, but the current construct of IP laws are far less efficient in getting the money to the right people than even the worst run government programs. Not even a 10th of the money paid by the population reaches the intended group, a level that for any actually accountable and controlled taxation form would cause an uproar.

Re:Utter Crap

[mccalli]

If the average person has 10 pieces of gold total to spend 1 piece of gold each on copyrighted works and instead pirates 1,000 different copyrighted works, you cannot say that the market lost 1,000 pieces of gold. That's just common sense.

It's also total strawman.

Consider the piracy of software, for instance. Let's take...ooh, I don't know, err...Photoshop for instance. Massively pirated, and pretty expensive. You might correctly say that should I pirate a copy of Photoshop, Adobe has not lost a sale of Photoshop since I was never going to buy it anyway.

This is too simplistic though. I wasn't going to buy Photoshop, so what could I have done? I could have used any of a number of other programs - Adobe's cut-down versions, on my platform (Mac) I could have used Pixelmator. I could have used Paintshop Pro on Windows, I could have started using GIMP or derivatives (I like Seashore myself - GIMP with a more familiar interface). All those applications are quite definitely within my reach, and whilst it's true they don't have the full capabilities of Photoshop if I needed that level of control it's not unreasonable to expect me to pay for it.

So I've not deprived Adobe specifically of a Photoshop sale, but I've damaged the market (including GIMP's free) for alternatives. It's still a damaging act by me to do this.

I don't support some of the ludicrous draconian penalties being chucked around, but I also don't support the 'pretend it's all ok and the companies are just stupid' attitude that I hear far too often on here.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Yes, sensible reforms are needed!

[Jabbrwokk]

In Canada we don't send people to prison -- we send them home. Or to the country club minimum security prison. The only way to get thrown in the maximum security facility is to intentionally kill someone and eat their eyeballs. Or bring a camcorder into a theatre in Quebec.