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The Internet Your Rights Online

Googling May Break Copyright in Canada 333

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-searching dept.
twray writes "From The Globe&Mail: Could it be possible that Canada will make Google or any other Internet search and archiving engines illegal? Bill C-60, which amends the Copyright Act and received its first reading in the House of Commons on June 20, suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines."
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Googling May Break Copyright in Canada More

Googling May Break Copyright in Canada

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  • so? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sweetdelight ( 895373 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:11PM (#13059671)
    So, just dont base any canadian Google in Canada and Just keep google in U.S
    • But would this make it illegal to use such services, or only to host them within Canadian jurisdiction? I suppose Google's safe if it's the latter.

    • I'm just waiting for someone to claim (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...the Canadian version of Google will be better and cheaper than the U.S. one, even if it takes several months to get a result.
    • I'd like to say how smug and pleased I feel that, just this once, it isn't the United States with the new idiotic copyright law to push through -- that someone else is doing something stupid in the IP world that the US is doing right. Makes me feel downright patriotic. In the US, *we* don't hate archive.org and Google. So there!

      • Re:Take that, Canucks (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        In the US, *we* don't hate archive.org and Google

        Yeah, we sue the things we don't hate in the US. It's like we're a country of sadists of something..
      • "I'd like to say how smug and pleased I feel that, just this once, it isn't the United States with the new idiotic copyright law to push through"

        It's the same groups that are lobbying governments worldwide to enact these sky-is-falling-laws though. It is already illegal to publish copyrighted material that you don't have permission for doing that. We need a fair way for copyright holders to enforce their rights against people who are breaking the law. That can be done without most of the content of th

        • Re:Take that, Canucks (Score:2, Interesting)

          by uberdave ( 526529 )
          How 'bout this: if you publish it on the web, it is public domain.

          • Re:Take that, Canucks (Score:5, Interesting)

            by typical ( 886006 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:48PM (#13060305) Journal
            I think Stallman might get a bit irritable about that.

            I *do* think that if you provide something via the regular, non-authenticated Web, you should be prepared to allow people to mirror that item, and not to have control over when that item *stops* being offered. Because that's just how the Web *works*, and trying to apply meatspace rules to the Web, where costs of replication and distribution are vastly different from meatspace, just doesn't make sense.

        • Re:Take that, Canucks (Score:5, Insightful)

          by JohnnyNoSPAM ( 815401 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @12:23AM (#13060712)
          I concur. As corporations globalize, their lobbying efforts will globalize proportionally.

          Over at Groklaw, PJ touches on this in an article about Internet Archive being sued article [groklaw.net] She makes good points such as recommending that site owners utilize subscriptions to protect content that they do not wish to be open to the public domain. The is also a discussion of the robots.txt file that many sites use and search engines honor voluntarily.

          Search engines are tremendously effective tools for bringing visitors to web content. Without them, many web sites would go unnoticed. I don't see that attacking the search engines will be effective. I believe that simple solutions such as those PJ has touched on are readily available and easy to implement rather than resorting to such extensive legislation, and I agree that this is what we as citizens need to convey this to our respective governments.

      • Re:Take that, Canucks (Score:5, Funny)

        by xQx ( 5744 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @11:07PM (#13060403)
        Maybe it's part of some Free-Trade negotiations...

        America: No, You didn't support us in our silly War that we're still stuck in. We are going to Tariff you!
        Canada: How about we pass some silly laws so yours look less silly? you know, people are talking...
        America: Can you start a war with Albania for no reason so our voting public can be annoyed at you and forget about Iraq?
        Canada: Maybe... but lets just start with the silly laws.
        America: Okay, have a cigar.

    • Run To America! Fear The Iron Fist of Canada ! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Shihar ( 153932 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:13PM (#13060105)
      This is almost like reverse 'US politicians are going to eat me syndrome' from the US where whenever a stupid bill is proposed a dozen posts pop up threatening to move to Canada.

      Breath.

      The bill has not been passed into law. The bill has been vaguely considered. The likely scenario is that some crotchety old bastard who doesn't even own a TV in the northern wastelands of Canada who was elected by his four neighbors, which live 100 miles away (giving him a solid 90% of the vote), was given a wet dream bill by a lobbyist going through the motions to receive his paycheck. Someone politician owns a computer a thousand blood thirsty lobbyist representing any industry hurt by said bill are going to descend upon the capital and decry the bill as the music industries attempt to trying to eat Google, libraries, and small children. The liberals are going to recoil in disgust at the realization that bill might help the music industry, and the conservatives with a hard on for Google or some other corporation will promptly decry the bill as undue government interference. It will then be completely lobotomized and be reworded to either say, "It is illegal to provide copywrite information location tools powered by babies pulled from their mother's wombs" or turned into a poison pill of a bill and be reworded to say, "Canada will construct a tower of dead babies from which the music industry can lord over the small people of Canada as Gods".

      Whatever version they pick it will be written in both French and English.

      Both sides will make long winded speeches that has nothing to do with the law being discussed. These speeches will get chopped up and put into campaign literature.

      The campaign literature will also be in both French and English.

      It will be a unanimous voted on either way, either against making a tower of dead babies or for making it illegal to run a device powered by dead babies. Whatever the case, at the end of the day, the political system will defeat this bill in its own kludgy and ham-fisted way.

      So breath, no one has to move to the US to escape the iron fist of the Canadian government.

      • Re:Run To America! Fear The Iron Fist of Canada ! (Score:5, Informative)

        by EvilAlien ( 133134 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:35PM (#13060224) Journal
        Uh. No.

        Here is the scoop. The Bill is ISP friendly (no liability for being the means of communication by which copyright infringement occurs), and will likely be Google-friendly by the same provisions. What we have is a Bill diluted from the insane brainchild of the Liberal-Heritage Ministry-Copyright Lobby circle jerk thanks to various factors, largely thanks to the efforts of everybody-who-isn't-a-blood-sucking-copyright-lobb y-group.

        The Bill will go for second reading when parliament resumes, and will probably get passed before the minority Liberal government calls a vote in late winter/early spring. PM Martin has control of the government thanks to his willingness to give the NDP the budget ammendment reach-around, the Conservative leader's brilliant alienation of his only allies (the separatist Bloc Quebecois), and the voting tendencies of the Canadian public (no matter what the Liberals do to prove they are corrupt, voters in Ontario will still vote for them whether or not Stephen Harper keeps ramming his foot in his mouth).

    • Re:so? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Captain_Chaos ( 103843 )

      So, just dont base any canadian Google in Canada and Just keep google in U.S

      Yeah, 'cause the US would never pass draconian laws like this...

      Right?

      Right?

      <crickets chirping>

  • Why bother w/this then? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:11PM (#13059672)
    The bill defines information location tools as "any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network."

    Would that mean that library networks that allow you to find copyrighted material are illegal too? All of the libraries I've been in recently have an online card catalogue which is usually accessable in-house and over the web... Granted they might not be caching materials and making thumbnails but who knows? Maybe the libraries even use site:library.org with Google to do searches.

    But, cautions Mr. Knopf, Bill C-60 has received first reading only, and that "there"s a lot of time for them to take this out or to fix it."

    He warns that "we shouldn't cripple the Googles of the world by imposing copyright chill on the very basis of their architecture. In fact, they perform a very useful service to copyright owners by enabling easy detection of infringement. The owners should go after the actual infringer, rather than effectively shooting the messenger."

    Then why even bother to draft it? This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.

    • Re:Why bother w/this then? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AlexTheBeast ( 809587 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:27PM (#13059800)
      Gogling for DRM-free music files [tech-recipes.com] or e-books [tech-recipes.com] is a well known way for people to copy files.

      Who fault is this? Is it my responsibility not to leave my directories of music files open for the public to copy? Or is it my responsibility not to copy files from open directories?

      Either way, google is the tool. As liberal as I am... guns do not kill without a person pulling the trigger.

      Google (and MSN too [tech-recipes.com]) provide a service. It is not their fault if people use it for evil.
      • Gogling for DRM-free music files or e-book is a well known way for people to copy files.

        So, are you saying that they are coming out of the gate with high-stakes to piss everyone off and create a stir and then they will re-write the bill completely to only go after DRM-free music files and e-books which aren't cached and thumbnailed?

        So basically they would be coming up w/an entirely new bill that has nothing to do w/the current one?

        I just find that hard to believe. If they wanted to do that they wouldn'

      • Re:Why bother w/this then? (Score:4, Funny)

        by ComputerSlicer23 ( 516509 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:45PM (#13059921)
        You're just not very creative. I'm confident, you can pistol whip someone to death, without pulling the trigger...

        I've know of people who have had relative die by accidential discharge without anyone pulling the trigger. I'm not it's not unheard of while climbing over a fence to have some idiot lean a shotgun over. He'll jostle the fence, or the shotgun will get enough force applied to discharge the weapon without anyone pulling a trigger. It's one of the reasons you should always crack a shotgun open when you climb over a fence. I'm fairly sure, it's a good safty precaution to have it cracked all execpt when shooting if it's the style of shotgun you can do that with (breach loading, not a pump if I understand shotguns enough).

        Oh, for the record, I'm a big believer in an armed society is a polite society. Guns have their place, and having them be common in society isn't such a bad thing.

        Kirby

      • Not only Google... but this effectively outlaws any P2P application with a search.....

      • [...] guns do not kill without a person pulling the trigger.

        Someone else remarked on this with ways in which a gun can be fired accidentally. Thanks to technology and robot drones, we have ways in which Iraqis can be killed without a human pulling the trigger as well.

        Of course, it's a human that designed it, and likely it's not fully autonomous (yet). I just read a short story by Philip K. Dick which is very pertinent, and has a really cool twist ending; it was "Second Variety", about the killi

    • This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.
      The capital worth of google and the number of investors should help to avoid legislation like this in the US.
    • Then why even bother to draft it? This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.

      The same reason people buy lottery tickets, you just never know....

      • See... except that these people are writing laws... not pitching in money into a common pool with the hopes that they will claim other people's money.

        What does Canada stand to gain from this? Let's look at:

        Pros -

        Protect copyright holders, except this is hard to enforce, since google is US based, and we're talking about broad-reaching wordage that would have to expand to about 50 pages to get to the specificity it would require to actually be, you know, pertinent.

        Cons -

        Fuck over THE largest influence on
    • Then why even bother to draft it? This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.

      Because it scares the hell out of a lot of people, and gives you negotiating leverage. And if you don't care all that much about search engines, even better. It's Politics 101.

    • Canadian politicians waste a lot of their time on proposals and posturing, knowing full well that it's not going to pass into law. The one advantage to the public is that a few politicians gains some education as to why a proposal is a bad idea. Of course the politicians themselves see it primarily as an opportunity to grandstand and garner some attention for all the "work" they do.

      Don't forget all the civil servants and contractors who'll be hired to "study" the issue so amendments and changes can be

  • This doens't really make any sense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mrs. Grundy ( 680212 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:16PM (#13059708) Homepage
    Almost nobody who profits from the sale an licensing of copyrighted work is losing money due to competition from search engines. Just the opposite in fact. Most people who create work whether art, photography, music, or writing also would like to be ranked highly in search engines--in fact many people actually pay google for advertisements. I don't really understand who is gaining anything from this. Seems like a law that hurts everybody involved.
    • Yes. It's odd how a medium that millions use to find sites of interest could be harmed by a search engine. Indeed, while looking for some hard to find parts for a lab I'm working in, Google's cache ability directed me to the names of some companies that make old or hard to find parts. The cache showed previous sellers, which led to a trail to other vendors who still have items in stock. That should be a good thing.
    • That's because these particular effects were not the point nor purpose of the law. They are side effects due to the fact that the legislation is so horribly flawed at its very deepest levels.

  • Short and sweet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alex P Keaton in da ( 882660 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:16PM (#13059710) Homepage
    Short and sweet: This is what happens when legislation can't keep up with tech, and legislators don't understand tech
    Look at some of the stuff here in the states- I mean, a bunch of 200 year old Supreme court judges making laws about P2P when they dont even use email????
    I thought Canadians had a reputation for being reasonable....
    If Google is outlawed, only Outlaws will Google.
    I have to go, I need to google tyrany.

  • Canada vs. Google (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mrs. Grundy ( 680212 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:18PM (#13059730) Homepage
    Maybe as google is looking around for its next acquisition it should consider Canada. I'm sure the accountants could find synergy of some kind there.

    • Re:Canada vs. Google (Score:5, Funny)

      by B3ryllium ( 571199 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:22PM (#13059758) Homepage
      Such an action would need to have the approval of Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

      • Re:Canada vs. Google (Score:5, Funny)

        by patio11 ( 857072 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @02:34AM (#13061133)
        When asked, Grace of God, of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, said of the matter: "Go for it, I've got no use for them anyway. All the worst parts of France and America with none of the food or guts that redeem them. I've been trying to pawn them off on another noble for thirty years but the only one who was interested was that grand-nephew six degrees removed from the Duke of Luxenbourg and he was far too decent of a chap to stick with them."

        Asked about the impending transfer of soverignty from her ex-Majesty to Google, Canada was rather disappointed but unwilling to cause a fuss. Quebec was outraged but plans to observe the traditional proprieties with a full surrender ceremony.

  • Think for a second. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:19PM (#13059735) Homepage Journal

    I think they're aiming at things such as torrent & eMule search engines not Google and Yahoo.

  • The sad fact is that most users use search to find anything. In fact, a great number of users will put a domain name in the search engine to find a site, rather than enter the address itself.

    So, what this means is that Canadian e-business will go straight down the tubes.

    Brilliant foresight.

  • It's a lawyer's world afterall (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:19PM (#13059739) Homepage

    Most regulations, such as this one, exist not to protect anyone, but just to make lawyers rich. It doesn't matter which side the lawyer takes, plaintiff or defendant, they both stand to make good money off of ambiguous and overly broad laws. Stuff like this just proves the old saying, "in a town with only 1 lawyer, the lawyer will starve but in a town with 2 lawyers they will never go hungry."

    On both sides of the border we make no pretense of electing people who actually know what they're doing. Almost every politician is a hack these days whether in America or Canada, and that probably applies to most countries in general. Look at that POS proposed by Leahy and Specter in the US recently [blindmindseye.com]. These lawyers and buisnessmen don't know a damn thing about the ramifications of their legislation most of the time, and when they do, malice is frequently their motivation for the diabolical implications of its scope. Is it any wonder why liberty-minded people tend to just eschew regulation altogether these days since most of the time, we have to choose between scoundrels and blithering idiots for our lawmakers?

    • Politicians Don't Draft Bills (Score:4, Funny)

      by Vagary ( 21383 ) <jawarren AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:37PM (#13059864) Journal
      Politicians don't draft bills, their staff does, and their staff is just an aggregator for lobbiests. So our representative democracies are really a distributed, collaborative, bill-authoring device. (ie: They could be replaced by a very small Wiki.)

      As for Bill C-60, I figure it's better if some lawyers make some $ than the government infringing on my fair use rights, so I'll write my MP and tell them to support it, then wait till the Supreme Court sorts out the mess.

  • Thats it....back in my day...! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ryg0r ( 699756 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:21PM (#13059751)
    I'm sick of all this crap. I'm gonna go back to how we old skoolers used to do it:

    Surfing random IP Addresses.

    For the ones that have decent content, I'll carve the number into my wooden desk.

  • It sounds like we need new directives in robots.txt [searchengineworld.com] to categorize what's permitted and what's not permitted regarding caching, archiving, display of conextual text around a search hit, time-to-live, copyright jurisdiction, etc.

    If some countries want to implement asinine policies, at least sites should have the decency (and the means) to let global information services, such as Google, respect those policies.

  • Lawmaking and The Internet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LowbrowDeluxe ( 889277 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:23PM (#13059762)
    It seems to me, that lawmakers are having to rush to catch up with the internet in much the same way the automobile revolution caught them with their pants down. Early on their were laws restricting cars to 4 miles per hour in some cities and townships, and at least one place where a person had to walk in front of the car with a lantern to warn people. Traffic law went through a lot of permutations as society tried to deal with the sudden ability for people and goods to be moved from place to place with ease. I think that's a pretty fair analogy of where we are at now with intellectual property.
    Except the analogy breaks down when confronted with the fact that there are companies in position to achieve, or at least maintain, obscene profit levels by preventing the expansion of intellectual traffic flow.
    • Thanks. I got a neat image of Civilization-type railroads (Civ I, that is, where you could move infinitely on a railroad).

      The Internet is a lot like a Civilization railroad: you can move stuff around, to all corners of the globe (and off it!), for essentially zero cost. It is an inflection point, and we haven't finished absorbing it yet.

  • With the minority government here, it's unlikely that the parties even agree to agree on lunch breaks. They had a hard enough time passing the budget (underhanded tricks aside)...never mind anything else. Besides, why would they pass a law to limit caching when 'robots.txt' can accomplish the same thing?
  • What BS all this is. How about a legislator putting out laws to ensure that we can keep using copyrights the way we have been for years, which has been giving us all a useable Internet, and hasn't done anything to harm the copyright owners? It hasn't made them as rich as mathematically possible, but that's not their right. The copyright is a temporary infringement of our rights to free expresion, justified because total free expression can clash with capitalism, without which our society *would* collapse. B

  • Robots.txt? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:26PM (#13059783)
    It should be widely known by any webmaster that you can simply place a robots.txt [searchengineworld.com] in your index folder and Google, archive.org, or any major archiving service will simply leave your whole site alone. No questions asked. It seems that going after google for something that would only take 5 minutes on your behalf is a little overboard.

  • who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by i_ate_god ( 899684 )
    Stop getting worked up over nothing. This is an initial draft, it wont be passed as law as is. This is just an attempt by the media to garner paranoia about some future restricting law because it will make them money.

    Just chill out and don't worry, Canada is not so stupid as to pass a bill that could possibly be as damaging as this.

    • Re:who cares? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Snocone ( 158524 )
      Just chill out and don't worry, Canada is not so stupid as to pass a bill that could possibly be as damaging as this.

      I am Canadian, you insensitive clod, and I'm bloody well TERRIFIED.
      • As a Canadian who claims to be "terrified" by this legislation, what exactly are you doing to prevent it from passing? The least you could do, of course, is write letters to your MP. You could even meet with them concerning this matter, and show them first hand the terror you feel. What are you prepared to do then? Will you picket? Will you organize rallies against this legislation?
        • Speaking of which, this is the one I sent to Ralph Goodale (my MP). Feel free to plagarise it for your own nefarious uses.

          I am writing to you about the proposed bill C-60. In your February 2004 newsletter, you said that you want to free MPs to vote as they choose and not merely the party line. It is with that in mind that I write to you about several concerns I have with this bill.

          First of all, the media recording levy that is currently placed on all blank media in Canada is supposed to go to fund th

  • "Providing" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:30PM (#13059819) Journal
    Google is not providing. They are not making it available. They are indexing its already existant availability and providing a link to it.

    If someone makes it available, it would have been "provided" whether or not Goggle indexed it and provided a link to it.

    Holding a search engine liable would leave them all open to sabotage by people posting copyrighted stuff and getting it indexed.
    • But then again , in the strictest sense of the word "provide", neither do the intended targets of the legislation: Bittorrent websites, DC++ servers and their ilk. They just provide an indexing service for content provided by third parties, similar to Google.

      If they want this law to have any teeth against P2P services, it must be written broadly enough to hurt google too.

      Just do a search for:
      "index of" metallica mp3
      and you will see that Google provides just as good a p2p search engine as any DC++ server.

  • Surely its about intent? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Demerara ( 256642 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:31PM (#13059825) Homepage
    If I put a website online, even if it's contents are copyright, surely anything which brings traffic to that website cannot be held responsible for subsequent abuse of the content? This is especially true if the intent of the person/tool which brings the traffic to my site is not to breach copyright but to connect visitor with content?

    If this can be banned, then we have to hold the Yellow Pages publishers guilty if a bank robber looks up the address of banks...

    (IANAL, as if you couldn't guess...).

  • Meta Tags (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kyndig ( 579355 )
    Any information can be copyrighted. Simply placing your name and year next to an original work provides copyright protection. Countries have different methods and laws governing copyright works, so I would wonder how feasible it is to place this type of regulation on information that is gained through public access.

    Recently I looked into META tags, and saw a copyright META TAG. I found it odd, but this _could_ provide a solution for indivuals. But in further looking, I see the robots: NOINDEX rule, which w

    • It's automatic, actually (Score:3, Informative)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Any information can be copyrighted. Simply placing your name and year next to an original work provides copyright protection.

      Actually, under the Berne Convention any information is copyrighted. Copyright is automatically granted to the creator of a work. Proving your authorship in court -- and proving that an infringer should have had knowledge of your authorship -- is the tricky part, and this is where copyright notification and registration come in handy.

  • We see bills, drafts, laws and whatnots proposed every week that all seem completely absurd. As if law-makers and the powers that be were testing us, just to see if we're still awake...

    Yes, sometimes we're shocked and react and post on slashdot and comment, etc.

    But how many stupid laws that have been voted can you count? How many patents are you infriging when you breathe? How many copyrights do you violate when you whistle a tune? Are we really awake?

  • Mr. Knopf (Score:2, Interesting)

    by L3on ( 610722 )
    Does anyone else find it funny that the copywrite lawyer looking over the bill shares the same last name as Alfred A. Knopf the famous publisher? The Knopf name is still used to this day as a book publisher even though Random House purchased the company from Knopf in 1960 and he is long since dead.

  • O Canada! What is going on? (Score:3)

    by derEikopf ( 624124 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:41PM (#13059893)
    O Canada!
    Our home and native land!
    True patriot love in all thy sons command.
    With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
    The True North strong and fr[censored]!
    From far and wide,
    O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
    God keep our land glorious and fr[censored]!
    O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
    O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
  • The music industry is the culprit behind this one. They have been at odds with the radio broadcasters & DJs who regularly make copies of music as part of their processes (editing for length, fade-in/fade-out, etc., clips). The music industry wants to get royalties for each copy the radio station & DJ makes, even if the listening public only hears it once.

    They even tried going after the makers of CD players at one time for the data caches in the electronics.
  • For a second there, I totally misread the headline to mean that the Canadians are so enamored with Google and it's "Do No Evil" philosophy that it granted Google a special right so that it "may break copyright". But can you blame me? Canada has always been more progressive and ahead of everyone else -- this is coming from a Texan!

  • There is a petition against most of this bill. (Score:3, Informative)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:50PM (#13059952)
    I did some research (using Google, oddly enough) and found a petition against most of what is in this bill.

    http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/ [digital-copyright.ca]

    Indeed, that is something that all Canadians who are against this bill should sign, no doubt.

  • The Bill itself... (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheUnknownCoder ( 895032 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:52PM (#13059973)
    can be found here [parl.gc.ca]

  • Just goes to show... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by l0ungeb0y ( 442022 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:53PM (#13059977) Homepage Journal
    That Pols inserting their heads up their ass whenever it comes to technology is not a USA only thing.

    But with a recent NYTimes piece making a case for the death penalty for script kiddies... and the pervasive atmosphere of ignorance driven hysteria towards IT, my question is how long before we actually start seeing the witch hunts begin in an earnest attempt to gain strong governement control of the internet?

    And if a programer floats like a duck, what then?

  • I don't see how this is an issue? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dryth ( 544014 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:02PM (#13060048)

    IANAL.

    However, the copyright holder needs to contact the source in question to have material removed. And, as far as I can tell, can only file an injunction. Reading C-60 myself, it reads as if it's making an exception specifically for search engines such that it isn't illegal copyright violation until such an injunction is filed.

    Makes sense that, if you ask a search engine to remove your content, they would comply. Just like most comply with robots.txt and whatnot.

  • Geee... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by NanotechLobster ( 866263 )
    Copyright laws and the internet don't mix. What a new and interesting concept.

  • Let's not go to Canada. 'Tis a silly place. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by yellowstone ( 62484 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:19PM (#13060135) Homepage Journal
    • Any company that wants to put copyright material on their web site, but doesn't want it indexed, should learn about the robots.txt [robotstxt.org] file.

    • As stated in TFA, the law would make any search engine illegal. Given that hiding your site from all search engines makes it pretty much invisible to the rest of the internet, why bother to have a public web site anyway?
    If they want to do something real, make ignoring robots.txt actionalbe.

  • Great. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @11:05PM (#13060390) Homepage
    This is just great. Making it illegal to look for anything. You may only watch/hear/read what you're given by your corporate masters. The internet essentially turned into television, where only those with big money for advertising will be heard. Now what do we say to those that call Canada "America Junior"?

  • Ummmmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Allnighterking ( 74212 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @11:34PM (#13060531) Homepage
    Doesn't this make the card catalog, the Dewey Decimal System et al, illegal as well. .... wait a second.... this also makes tests in school illegal. Since your memory is a system for the retreval of copyrighted information, aka a search and archiving engine ( The text book is copyrighted ) it would then be illegal for you to use your memory to recall anything. Since it's also illegal to force someone to break the law this would mean a teacher is in jepoardy as well. Since they are aiding and abetting in the creation of a crime.

    My god.... Canada just might succeed in making every 12 year olds dream come true.... no more school.
  • The article doesn't say that bill C-60 will make Google illegal. It says that one lawyer's opinion is that one sentence that is designed to limit Google's and other search engine companies' liability is worded wrong such that it could be interpreted as making Google's caching illegal.

    Clearly that is not the intention of the bill, and that sentence will be rewritten before the bill is passed if other lawmakers agree that it has that implication.

    So what's the fuss?

  • It doesn't matter what parliament thinks (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhilHibbs ( 4537 ) <snarks@gmail.com> on Thursday July 14, 2005 @04:10AM (#13061378) Journal
    But Bill C-60 suggests that Parliament considers such archiving activity is illegal.
    So the bill starts out from a presumption that something is already illegal. That doesn't make it so. If the courts don't think that the current law makes Google illegal, then it isn't illegal. That's what separating the legislature from the judiciary means.

    Disclaimer: this is ivory-tower thinking. Of course it matters.

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