Geist On Copyright As Canada Consult Nears End 38
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian law professor Michael Geist, who has been leading the charge on the national copyright consultation with his SpeakOutOnCopyright.ca site, has posted his own submission to the consultation. Geist focuses on issues like fair use and circumvention, and warns against a Canadian DMCA, copyright term extension, and three-strikes program. 'If copyright veers too far toward specific technologies by mandating new protection for specific business models or technological innovations, those rules risk being overtaken as the technologies and marketplace evolve. ... It should only be a violation of the law to circumvent a technological protection measure if the underlying purpose is to infringe copyright.' He also pointed out a few days ago that Bell Canada seems to be advising content owners to sue its own customers. The public consultation ends on September 13th."
so uh (Score:3, Interesting)
let me know when companies realize that 20th century business models don't work in the 21st century.
All we get from copyright laws are large global corporations working there way into every countries law system, molding it to help them with there profits.
Hoping for the best.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I definitely applaud Geists work in both creating public awareness over copyright issues and also being ardently vehement against improper use of copyright, but this really means little until we find out whether the how the consultations are published to the lawmakers. From what i've seen in the past I almost wonder if we draft up ridiculous copyright reform bills from time to time just to keep the insanities of the various content distribution industries happy while making it easy to be shot down in parliament.
Then again, Copps did get us a blank media tax that goes...somewhere... so perhaps the this doesn't always work or just appears to be the case.
You're such a tool (Score:2, Interesting)
The whole idea of millions of people being criminals because they use internet is ridiculous.
Of course it is - which is why that has never been the case.
Copyright should be changed to make sure that there are no provisions making "default" uses like copying and distributing bits found from the internet illegal.
I don't know what you mean by "default" and neither do you.
Firing up a p2p client to look for music which you know full well is copy righted work is a deliberate act - not something that happens automatically.
Question to ask is this: if you find some work from internet, what steps do you need to do to receive valid permission to use and share that work on internet?
You already know the answer to this:
Contacting _all_ copyright owners of the work...
Yup - you know.
...is clearly not suitable solution, because finding them all might be impossible, and even if you find them, every one of them is unlikely to agree on your request.
So, what you are saying is that respecting the rights of others is too hard, and if the answer is No, you'd prefer to just ignore that.
There needs to be a solution where individual end users can be confident that what they're doing with the internet is legal.
So, what you want to do is make all infringing legal - neat - wish I'd thought of that.
Even web use (reading news sites) or publishing material that you created yourself is extreamly risky, because current laws make some use, copying and distribution acts illegal by default.
Really? Care to share an example of anyone EVER getting into trouble publishing something they created themself?
Everything you do on internet relies on copying bits from one computer to another, and the default being that this is illegal is not very good.
And not very true either. In fact, it's utter horse shit like the rest of your post.
A lot of people have made compelling arguments against copyright in it's current form.
You are not one of them.
Re:Are you 12? (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>Copyright worked well for generations,
Actually it's never worked. Even in the 1800s authors had problems with people copying their books illegally. Charles Dickens frequently complained about unauthorized copies of his works appearing, and even though the government tried to punish those persons, the copies kept appearing.
The founder of the Democratic Party Thomas Jefferson said the idea made little sense, because if you own a printing press, along with paper and ink, why shouldn't you be able to use your OWN property however you see fit? It's your property - nobody else should be able to tell you how to use (or not use) your own stuff. The only reason he tolerated it was because it was a time-limited privilege (7 years in the early 1800s), and therefore didn't cause too much hassle.
But now it's around 1000 years which is insane. Copy PRIVILEGE should be time limited. It shouldn't be like Mickey Mouse which is still copyrighted 50 years after the original artist (Walter Elias Disney) died. In order to enrich society, works need to fall into the public domain, just like all the other great works of fiction (Paradise Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Pilgrims Progress, Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield) have fallen into public domain. That's how you enrich a culture.
try a refined model (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a middle ground that apparently hasn't been tried much yet by the perpetual copyright and DRM crowd. The current practice with the entertainment cartel is to charge a per unit price that is grossly distorted upwards. They want to maintain some level of cash transferred "per unit" that doesn't adequately reflect the reproduction costs, it's inflated severely. They are still living way in the past when it really DID cost them a lot of money to make a "copy for sale". It just ain't that way any more, yet their per unit pricing hasn't changed much.
Especially when you look at digital copies of this or that, but it still applies to data bits on a stamped plastic disk as well. Just *perhaps* if they had tracked technological innovation better, and seriously dropped what they charged, they could have maintained similar profits by merely increasing their sales using the "economy of scale" model. And, at the same time, not alienated their customers so much.
A *buck* for a few megs of download for *one* tune? Out to lunch. Ridiculously over priced, how about 5 cents or so? That might be like one cent bandwith, 4 cents profit. I don't know exactly but it would be something like that. I mean, do those media cartel goofballs REALLY think and expect that people are going to fill up their multi gigabyte capacity tune players at a buck a song? What is that, what it costs to buy a freeking brand new car to do that legally? Are they just crazy, or stupid, or both? And they wonder why a lot of their potential customers are abandoning that pricing model being offered?
10-20 bucks for less than a dollar worth of stamped plastic and some printed up cardboard? Try two or three bucks instead. And I *know* it can be done for that price at new retail level, I have bought old TV show stuff brand new on DVD for that at chinamart before. Just sell a lot more copies at a more reasonable price, because people are more apt to buy and not peg leg it when it isn't obviously blatant price gouging.