CRIA, MPAA Demand Expanded DMCA For Canada 224
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Recording Industry Association and the MPAA's Canadian
subsidiary are demanding
that Canada adopt copyright laws that go beyond even the DMCA. The
groups demand anti-circumvention law, three strikes and you're out
legislation, and increased secondary liability for websites. The
demands come as part of the national copyright
consultation in which hundreds of Canadians have spoken out against such
reforms."
As a Canadian let me say... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuck you.
We've been opposed to this shit since the beginning of your so-called "reforms," and now you go one further and try to make it even more draconian?
And you wonder why I have no qualms subverting your business model and giving money in a more direct manner to the artist instead.
Net Neutrality and Copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
Well this will make things interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
In Canada, broadband is classified as an essential service, so any 3 strikes law will fail. You cannot deny a person what is deemed a right.
Re:Will Canadian Pols Roll Over (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh please!
The Liberals are at the same corporate trough as the Conservatives.
Remember Paul Martain? Do you remember him, our former prime-minster? The one who didn't want to pay Canadian taxes on his ships so he registered them outside the country and staffed them all with foreign workers, yet still called his shipping company 'Canadian Shipping'. Do you remember him? Do you remember the private copying levy that the Liberals introduced back in 1997? Where we have to pay extra money on all blank media we buy here to compensate the poor media companies and the losses they incur? The Liberals have ZERO problem with enacting the same laws.
If you want a leader who's against new copyright laws you have to look to the ones who're anti-american like the Bloc, and the NDP, or Green.
Isn't it time someone sued their pants off? (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall quite a few incidents where the RIAA, MPAA and their members and brethren have been caught using unlicensed code on their websites.
Now, if this code is part of the navigation, chances are it'll be included on every single page served. Now, even if say http://www.riaa.com [riaa.com] only got 100 visitors per day, and each visitor only visited two pages, that'd be 200 counts of breach of copyright.
At an average $22,500 per copyright violation, that comes up at $4,500,000 ... per day.
Step 1) Write code
Step 2) Find RIAA using that code unlicensed
Step 3) Profit
Even if they somehow get the damages reduced in court, they'll be arguing that their own claims for damages are completely out of proportion.
Plus, as a group who is supposedly on the side of the creators, it'd look really bad if they tried to claim ignorance, unfair damages, that code isn't worth as much as songs etc.
Basically it's a win-win situation.
So, to all you bright people out there, I urge you to get hacking!
But don't go putting code onto their webservers without them knowing it - that defence doesn't fly well in RIAA cases, and it'd be unfair to use it against them ;)
Re:Will Canadian Pols Roll Over (Score:3, Interesting)
Here, we will find out if Canadians have more balls than us Americans who live south of the 49th parallel. Hopefully, the Canucks will tell them all to eat shit, and that will give the voters in the states a little motivation to get off THEIR dead asses to protest.
Re:As a Canadian let me say... (Score:4, Interesting)
You think you can jail 3/4 of a country?
How about a compromise? (Score:5, Interesting)
The MPAA/RIAA/etc gets their draconian copyright laws but with two modifications:
1) When the copyright on a work expires, they are required to publish a high quality public domain version of the work in a well-documented format. (e.g. a high bitrate MP3 or lossless FLAC for audio. MPEG-2 for video.)
2) Copyright terms will be shortened to 5 years.
Re:Well this will make things interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Could I get a link to where you're hearing this from? I've only read last year that the CRTC was considering classing it as an essential service, but I never heard anything further about it.
Will corrupters of the US get control of Canada? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will the corrupters of the U.S. get control of Canada, too?
By some measures, the U.S. government is the most corrupt in the world. For example, this Rolling Stone article: The Great American Bubble Machine [rollingstone.com]. (The full article is in the paper edition, available at any library.)
The U.S. government spends more money on surveillance and war than any country in the history of the world. That taxpayer money partly helps those who want corruption to profit, and hurts U.S. taxpayers, and the entire world. For just one example, see the book: House of Bush, House of Saud [amazon.com]
The U.S. government has invaded or bombed 25 countries since the 2nd world war [evergreen.edu]. Most or all of the interference was for profit. Quote: '... although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites' The dictators pay the corrupters. In Iraq, the U.S. government wanted control over the oil, and didn't care how many people it killed. In Afghanistan, the corrupters want to build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a port where the oil can be delivered.
The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any country ever in the history of the world, over 6 times higher than in Europe, for example. Wikipedia quote: Approximately one in every 18 men in the United States is behind bars or being monitored. [wikipedia.org]
U.S. citizens don't want to believe that their government is as corrupt as it is, even though the recent financial corruption has made many of them poor.
If the corrupters have success in Canada, they will only want more. The problem is MUCH bigger than most people think.
Re:As a Canadian let me say... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Will Canadian Pols Roll Over (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, well, well...
The Liberals are neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in the polls and are looking for an issue to galvanize the elusive 18-35 year old citizens into voting.
If only there was something contentious, like making it illegal to copy legally purchased materials or record TV. Something like "You could go to jail or face $20,000 for owning a modded XBox." Telling young professionals that content will be decided not by the CRTC, but by cable providers and American lobby groups. If you buy a DVD for your kids and let them use a ripped copy to skip the ads and keep the copy clean, that's a violation of WIPO, which could jail you and bankrupt you. Using any operating system that bypasses security features would do the same, too.
If only there was a way to contact your local Liberal [liberal.ca], Bloq [blocquebecois.org], and NDP [www.ndp.ca] MPs and let them know how you, as a citizen and registered voter, think this is worth an election.
Imagine the ads:
Have a guy walking down the street, listening to an MP3 player. A van pulls up next to him, and RCMP with guns order him to the ground. One policeman grabs the player, looks through it, says, "full of mp3s" to another one. They arrest him and put him in the van.
Announcer: "This is the Conservative plan for copyright reform."
Re:hundreds?? (Score:1, Interesting)
I recently had a meeting at work. Someone brought up the fact that they would post (journal) articles on an internal web site to share with others who had access (many of these would be people outside our organization). I mentioned that that was actually copyright infringement, and to be careful who you were sharing that link with. Everyone there was over 50 and all initially refused my argument and said that was silly; it was no different then just printing out the article and sharing it. We argued for a while, and everyone sort of "took my word for it", but you could still see they just didn't get it. To them putting the article on a web site and e-mailing the link was the same as lending someone the article. If they don't get that what they were doing is illegal, I can't imagine them trying to understand the DMCA with things like its safe-harbour provisions and anti-circumvention provisions.
You should have seen when I tried explaining to one of the staffers here that it is not illegal to own a copy of a movie he already has, but that it is illegal to make the copy itself. Poor guy just wanted to make a copy of a DVD he had to put on his CrackBerry.
"US strong-armed Canada on DMCA" (Score:5, Interesting)
I did attempt to submit this as a story a year ago. Didn't make the cut:
rbrander writes "Canadian copyright watchdog Michael Geist has written the story of How the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill". The arm-twisting was pretty up-front: "Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file." ... "the USTR...made veiled threats about 'thickening the border' between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda."
The link for that submission was: http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/443867 [thestar.com]
So, bottom line: It isn't the industry telling a nation of 30M people what to do, it's an industry saying "We pull strings and US trade negotiators dance the mamba for us. Do as you're told or they'll dance that mamba all over your timber, cattle, grain, and steel sales to a trading partner 10X your size."
Not many people know that Canada is the US' largest trading partner: much larger than China, larger than China and Britain combined. But the converse is staggering: the US is 80% of our TOTAL world trade. When the US negotiators hit the table saying "No discussion of of all our trade issues about the big-ticket items until you cave on the little wee Intellectual Property issue", the Canadian government has very little choice but to comply. That goes across party lines.
Re:Will Canadian Pols Roll Over (Score:2, Interesting)
We've got one [piratepartyofcanada.com]