Tech Companies Say Don't Blame Canada For Copyright Problems 104
An anonymous reader writes "The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which includes a who's-who of the tech world, including Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Fujitsu, AMD, eBay, Intuit, Oracle, and Yahoo, has issued a strong defense of current Canadian copyright law, arguing that the US is wrong to place Canada on the annual Special 301 list. The submission argues that the US should not criticize Canada for not implementing anti-circumvention rules (PDF) and warns against using the Special 301 process to 'remake the world in the image of the DMCA.'"
Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Interesting)
To get back on topic, the chances are very remote, and that's the way I like it. Personally, I feel Canadian copyright law is far ahead of the US's DMCA centric attitude. The nature of copyright has to evolve with current times and technologies, allowing P2P downloads for personal use while putting a fee on MP3 players and blank media is a compromise that I see as fair.
Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Personally, I'm a big fan of the fact that we can format-shift, and make copies of friends' music, and stuff like that. I recognize the necessity to respect copyright, but the US has gone completely overboard, and few industries have any idea of the proper way to deal with it.
(In case any industry movers/shakers are reading this, the proper way isn't DRM, it's increasing ease and accessibility of your work.)
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The levy is currently 24cents for audio cassettes and 29cents for CDs. [cpcc.ca]
Kinda expensive if you DONT download/copy media. Gotta get my moneys worth!
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Yeah, really. I'm pretty sure 29c/CD is more than I paid total for the last spindle of CDs I bought here in the US.
A media levy would suck for me. I don't P2P and I burn my own music onto those discs.
Ultimately a media levy taxes the wrong thing. People consuming pirated material in large volumes don't use limited-write media like CD-Rs. They use MP3 players with hard drives they can write very many times. I'm sure there's a levy on those as well, but I bet those users pay proportionally far less.
So I guess
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See also this:
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/735096--geist-record-industry-faces-liability-over-infringement [thestar.com]
Basically Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada are being sued for not paying the artists.
And quote:
After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid. Indeed, they are also seeking puni
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Actually the Canadian system was put in place to make it legal to format shift. As in make a copy for your car stereo. The courts have ruled that this includes all music sharing.
Perhaps you are in favour of people being sued for making a copy for their car or MP3 player but I'm happy I can buy a CD, rip it and copy it to my wife's MP3 player all legally.
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Personally, I'm a big fan of the fact that we can format-shift, and make copies of friends' music, and stuff like that.
Don't you pay for that privilege, though, via some sort of tax/levy system? It's not as if this is a something-for-nothing deal where Big Media is getting ripped off.
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Yes and no. Some blank media like CDr has the levy but they never got around to implementing it for blank DVDs, MP3 players etc.
Now a days blank DVDs are cheaper then blank CDs and since everyone has a DVD player/burner...
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Leaving ethical implications of piracy aside, I'm just curious whether you're sure your BT connections are encrypted. Many clients offer encryption for the purpose of circumventing traffic shaping procedures used by some ISPs, but are very adamant that this encryption does NOT provide any assurance in skirting the law. As far as I am aware, no client offers true endpoint-to-endpoint encryption, but even if they did offer it, most clients choose low-strength ciphers like RS4, because using the stronger AES c
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The American RIAA can suck my Canadian dick, and I've never really heard of the CRIA going after anyone for downloading, but I maybe wrong about that.
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The CRIA went after a canadian based P2P distribution site (isohunt), but AFAIK has not gone after 'end-users'. Personally I don't think going after sites like isohunt does much to deter those that will download illegal copies. When 1 site goes down, 5 more come up, hosted in some foreign country.
I'd like to think that if movie & music (and other content) publishers adopted an online distribution mechanism for a fair fee, the industry would flourish instead of flounder. Case in point, last I heard iTune
Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that things like file sharing are legal in Canada is specifically because Canadian copyright law *hasn't* changed. Our laws were written in the 1980's, when it wasn't really easy to copy a large volume of music, and the risk was mostly just people copying a CD to a cassette for a friend, or making a mix tape for somebody. You weren't dealing with high volume copies, and you weren't dealing with anything near the ubiquity that the Internet affords, which is a large part of why the laws are so relaxed here.
Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps it's that Canadian copyright law was wisely crafted with the future in mind.
I see that you are not familiar with our politicians.
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The current ones or the previous ones. Not that the predecessors didn't have their issues, but many did seem to have a set a values that have woefully been forgotten in these days.
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Ha!
No, it means our politicians are as ineffective as other places, perhaps more so. They've tried to reform copyright law 2 times already and failed to pass the bills into law. Thus our copyright law is stuck in the 1980s, which turns out to be better than DMCA-style laws.
There are times when ineffective government is good government :-)
It also helps that we've had a string of minority governments, which has kept each party in power from ramming whatever they like through parliament, and makes them more
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The reason that things like file sharing are legal in Canada is specifically because Canadian copyright law *hasn't* changed. Our laws were written in the 1980's, when it wasn't really easy to copy a large volume of music, and the risk was mostly just people copying a CD to a cassette for a friend, or making a mix tape for somebody. You weren't dealing with high volume copies, and you weren't dealing with anything near the ubiquity that the Internet affords, which is a large part of why the laws are so relaxed here.
I meant in 2007, when the RCMP officially stated their stance on P2P file sharing for personal use. Their decision for P2P and the decision to put that fee on MP3 players is a decision for current times. At least, I consider anything within the past 5-10 years fairly recent, in terms of the speed of our legislation.
Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that things like file sharing are legal in Canada is specifically because Canadian copyright law *hasn't* changed.
Actually, Canadian copyright law has been changing constantly. [pch.gc.ca]
Our laws were written in the 1980's
Incorrect. 1988 was the first major overhaul since the law was written in 1924, however there have been a bunch of updates (in 1989, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001 and 2007) to bring it to its current state - for example, when the 1988 law was enacted, the private copying right that we now enjoy (and that this thread is about) did not exist - it was illegal to copy any music without written permission, regardless of the reason. It wasn't until the amendment in 1997 that we gained the legal right to make private copies.
Misinformed Canadians Re:Proudly Canadian (Score:1)
You're not as familiar with Canadian law as you think you are.
The private copying regime came into existance in 1997, not the 1980's, and is only one year earlier than the USA's DMCA. It also only applies to audio recordings -- downloading anything else that is under copyright without permission is just as illegal in Canada as it is in the United States.
It is unfortunate that some of our idiotic politicians (mostly Liberals) mis-informed Canadians about the state of Canadian copyright law in their desire
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The media levy is great for people who want to justify getting music without paying for it.
However, people whose works are being distributed have no way of being fairly compensated out of the levy collections. By fairly compensated, I mean that levy proceeds are distributed in a way related to the relativ
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The nature of copyright has to evolve with current times and technologies, allowing P2P downloads for personal use while putting a fee on MP3 players and blank media is a compromise that I see as fair.
I think it might be nice for us Canadians since the levies are not too high, but still a horrible compromise.
Conceding that everyone who buys MP3 player or blank media is a sort of criminal by putting a levy on the player is a horrible idea to me. It gives everyone in the country a license to be a legitimate pirate, because they're paying the penalty whether they like it or not. What kind of logic is "don't do this, it's bad, but even if you don't, we're taking your money anyway"? I've heard Indy produc
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Unless the ISP gets a complaint from the copyright holder, they're not going to warn you for it. They do use traffic shaping to deprioritize traffic like BitTorrent, though, so you might notice lower transfer rates during peak hours, but that's about it.
And you're right, the ISP is much happier to charge you for the overage. In fact, most of those ISPs will actually sell you bandwidth "insurance" packages to allow you to have the overage... Bell, for example, will charge $5/month per 40GB extra you buy, to
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That's true. Friends of mine have received warning notices from Telus for downloading via P2P clients. They've all since moved to Shaw, who doesn't seem to care what people download as long as the bill is paid.
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so the company lets you do it as long as you bribe them with paid excessive usage fees?
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Don't you mean, "Fuckin' eh!! Eh."?
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You know what I mean, eh?
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What are you talking aboot?
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That's far from a certainty. When you download content illegally, your don't pay the blank media levy and the issue remains somewhat gray. I suspect, however, that the next time it comes to court the ruling will not support the downloader, although damages will be limited to $500 per infringement. What is certainly illegal, is uploading copyrighted content in Canada. That means that if you use a P2P network and an investigation gets a hold of some packets of copyrighted material from your IP, you can be sue
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There never was a south park reference joke so beautifully setup before this
That's not true. If you're looking for the best South Park joke setup, the Simpsons did it.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are these companies when it comes to US legislation?
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In some respects, I think they would like to see the US adopt a more "Canadian" attitude, specifically with regard to Fair Use/Dealing. I suspect the true motive of these companies becomes clear in the last paragraph:
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[...] the world in the image of the DMCA, a world in which millions of automated cease-and-desist requests based on computer-generated allegations automatically trigger the blocking and take down of material, including of lawfully posted material, all without any due process or any judicial involvement.
[...] the desires of certain rightsholder constituencies which seek to ban activities that are permitted under the copyright laws through the backdoor of a digital technological lock.
wrong-headed policy; [...] cripple their own industries' innovation and damage the welfare of their own consumers.
There is nothing new to the average Slashdot reader in there; it's saying the same as many here have already ranted: DMCA is bad, DRM is not about copyright but a backdoor to gain more control over customers, and it is silly and damaging. But considering which companies this text comes from, I'd say this is some quite str
In other news... (Score:1)
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Hell's fielding an olympic team this year then? Awesome!
DON'T Blame Canada?! (Score:3, Funny)
You're on the list (Score:5, Insightful)
I vaguely remember at primary school, the use of friends/enemies lists in the ongoing process of classroom politics.
Apparently some people never grow out of classroom politics, and go on to become actual politicians. "Canada can't come to my birthday party."
Canada's IP laws are in some senses stricter (Score:5, Interesting)
But they've left out all of the dumb, anti-consumer portions that increasingly blight US law. How DARE they!
Special 301 list ?? (Score:5, Funny)
I hope the Canadians put us on a "Special Douche Bag" list
Gotta love our ability to spit on our friends
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I hope the Canadians put us on a "Special Douche Bag" list
I'm sorry, sir, but I regret to inform you that you have been on that list for quite some time now.
--random Canadian.
Re:Special 301 list ?? (Score:5, Funny)
Canada likes America. We just think you're mostly all insane. But after putting up with Quebec for so long, that's not a big deal.
Re:Special 301 list ?? (Score:4, Funny)
Canada cares for the mentally ill? It must really cost a lot of money? God forbid you ever decided to give away free health care in general...
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Yes it does cost lots of money, but we more than make up for that with the savings from our "death panels".
What's really humorous is that we already have 'death panels' here in the US. They're called HMO's and they decide when the odds of you surviving an illness become to low to make it worth the expense of treatment. They also decide which treatments and doctors you are allowed to see...
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Yes, but those are free-market death panels.
It's totally different if some gov't bureaucrat decided whether you get some medical procedure done.
Because now, you are always free to switch to another HMO if the current one isn't meeting your needs.
Brought to you by the letter 's', for sarcasm.
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Because now, you are always free to switch to another HMO if the current one isn't meeting your needs.
Really? Damn it! if only my grandmother had known!!!!
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Well, at least under the current death panels, you can get indemnity insurance which would cover treatment/illness regardless of what any HMO decides. You can also get treatment outside the HMO by either charity, private grant, or paying for it yourself without fear of facing jail time for doing so as the current proposals have decided was in your best interest. Your also not currently taxed to hell and back for carrying better insurance then the government equivalent of an HMO.
It's real easy to bitch and
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you can get indemnity insurance which would cover treatment/illness regardless of what any HMO decides.
You can't get insurance after becoming ill and have it cover anything to do with that illness. I'm not saying that is unfair but I think you will find that it's hard to get any form of insurance if you have certain conditions regardless of the fact that they will not affect you for many years. This seems very unfair to me and I expect that it will get worse. They already want to know if your parents have any illnesses so how long before they start using data mining to make sure they don't provide insurance
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Thank you for the long detailed response.
I am self employed so my situation is different than most people. The information on the chamber of commerce provided plans is very informative and I will look into it here in NC. I have a personal blue cross plan and they will not allow any modifications to it now that I'm not 100% perfect like I was before. Also they are doing some very odd ball stuff such as requiring me to try two other medications and then get a note from my DR every year before they will cover
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Canada likes America. We just think you're mostly all insane. But after putting up with Quebec for so long, that's not a big deal.
Funny - most of us Quebecois would say we put up with the rest of Canada ;)
All jokes aside, I think it must be pointed out that Quebec (alongside some political parties like the NDP) has been fighting for years against the rising "American" attitude towards copyright and culture in Ottawa. Culture being extremely important to us (it's basically the only thing left that distinguishes us from most of North America), our society and artists are extremely vocal about protecting everyone's right, both the artist
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I notice how you left Celine Dion off your list.
The main awesome things about Quebec are QC's beautiful old city and the women. Quebecois women are the most incredible in North America.
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you left Celine Dion off your list.
Isn't she Swiss? [wikipedia.org] :-)
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I second this. As a German who lived in the US and now Canada (Toronto) I think I can claim informed outside observer status. My impression is that Quebec's influence pulled Canada away from the "conservative" excesses found in the states. I credit Quebec in large part for Canada feeling much more European - culturally as well as politically- than the US.
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Hé! we all friends hein?
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wake up (Score:1, Flamebait)
Insanity. (Score:5, Insightful)
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My personal opinion, as a Canadian, is that copyright regulation such as in the USA is insane.
We disagree. They seem perfectly sane to us.
-Disney.
Re:Insanity. (Score:5, Insightful)
With that in mind I am proud of my Government for resisting the tide.
Don't be too hasty. The Government would have passed draconian copyright legislation a long time ago (they've tried a few times) if it weren't for the fact that it's a minority government.
- RG>
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Re:Insanity. (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't think it's the democratic elements of a government that would lead, in this particular case, to the thing you don't like. It's the representative aspects, who are kowtowing to the corporate influences, who will do so.
IMO,
C//
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Don't be too hasty. The Government would have passed draconian copyright legislation a long time ago (they've tried a few times) if it weren't for the fact that it's a minority government.
Yes, Harper is fully in support of DMCA-type legislation. He tried to pass some anti-circumvention thing a while ago. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad we have Liberals that are doing nothing except blocking this shit. :P
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Perhaps if you would concentrate on what I said instead of what you think you know, you would have payed attention to the "WCT" and the "WPPT" which is where the DMCA and anti-circumvention laws come from. It's neither part of the Berne Convention or WTO (TRIPS).
TRIPS is a WTO agreement not WIPO and the Berne convention is way before WIPO has come around. BTW, the WTO is where some of the trade advantages come from but the majority of them go through WIPO agreements which can be both executive agreements as
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It's alright, I was irritated by other things when I read your reply so I probably took it a little to far.
Some relevant links for Canadians (Score:4, Interesting)
Michael Geist's Blog [michaelgeist.ca] - Dr. Geist is a law professor who takes a rather dim view of the constant calls to make copyright law more strict.
The Pirate Party of Canada [piratepartyofcanada.com] - a small concern now, only about 100 card-carrying members, but it's not going to get any bigger (or reach the point where it's officially a party) if people don't get involved and at least send a bit of money their way to get over the legal hurdles. ($10 membership fee).
Dubbing Law (Score:1)
I have long felt that.... (Score:3, Interesting)
To that end, I would endorse the view that making a private copy of any copyrighted work, including time shifting, format shifting, decryption, or straight out copying, for the personal use of the person who is making the copy should *NOT* be copyright infringement, as long as the copy from which the private use copy is being made is not itself an infringing copy (or in the case where the copy from which it is made resides in a different place than Canada, nor would it be infringing on copyright under Canadian law). This exemption to copyright infringement should apply even if the copyright holder does not endorse such copying. Sharing, lending, selling, or any other way willfully distributing, giving, or providing such a private use copy to anybody else would negate this exemption, and unless they otherwise had permission from either the copyright holder or the agents that represent the copyright holder, such activity should render the person who created the copy now guilty of infringing on copyright.
The biggest reason I would advocate such a change to the current copyright law is simply owing to an issue of feasibility to enforce. If a person has made a copy of something that is truly for their own private use, there is not even a remotely possible way that anybody else would have even known that such a copy had even been made, and so it makes no sense to have any law in place that even implicitly would seem to disallow such an occurrence. Likewise, I think it makes a lot of sense to explicitly exempt such actions from copyright infringement so that people can have clearly defined boundaries on what is permitted and what is not.
IIPA and open source software (Score:2, Informative)
I took a look in the IIPA Special 301 report for Brazil at http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2010/2010SPEC301BRAZIL.pdf, it's very instructive. I particularly appreciated the following part in page 141:
Priority actions requested to be taken in 2010: ...
-
- Avoid legislation on the mandatory use of open source software by government agencies and government controlled companies.
Re:US influence (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger, 40 odd years ago, I used to wonder why America was considered a bastion of freedom. Possession of certain plants were highly illegal, being a communist was illegal, kids who went to the States for a year of schooling came back with stories about having to swear allegiance to the flag every day much like in a dictatorship. Black people were finally being allowed to use the same washrooms as white people. They could with a straight face have a constitution which stated all men were equal and allowed slavery.
America always seemed like the ultimate example of successful propaganda.
Re:US influence (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, first of all, the Constitution doesn't say that all men are created equal; the Declaration of Independence does. (Lots of Americans get those mixed up too.) The former is, in theory the supreme law of the land, while the latter is a document of great moral authority but no legal authority. But yes, it was written by a slaveowner, and that paradox occupied a great deal of the nation's early existence. It kind of came to a head in this little dustup a century and a half ago. Since then, we still haven't fully dealt with the consequences.
The basic problem is, you ask ten different Americans to tell you what "freedom" means, and you'll get eleven different definitions. Some are concerned almost exclusively with economic freedom; as long as they can make money, they're happy, regardless of what else may be going on. Some focus on social freedom: who they sleep with, where (or whether) they worship, what substances they can put in their bodies. Some are concerned primarily with freedom from foreign military threats; pretty much everyone agrees this is a prerequisite for the other freedoms, but there are and always have been many who take their concern with it to fanatical extremes -- they forget that in order to defend our freedom from those who want to take it away, we must have freedom left to defend.
And no matter what kind of freedom people are most worried about, a regrettably large number will say, in effect, "I've got my freedom, screw yours." Thus those fighting for the Confederacy, and their latter-day counterparts in white sheets and pointy hats, could claim in all seriousness that they were fighting for freedom: their freedom, and the fact that preserving their view of freedom meant denying it to large numbers of the people who lived in their society didn't bother them at all. Thus the flag could be defined as the symbol of freedom, and freedom limited to those who wished to pledge allegiance to it. Thus any act, no matter how vile, that was anti-communist could be defined as serving the interests of freedom.
Personally, my definition of freedom includes not only my freedom to do what I want to do, but others' freedom to do what they want to do, including things that I personally have no desire to do. But this definition is far from universally accepted. I don't think this is an exclusively American problem by any means, but it does seem like we're a bit better at others at fooling ourselves into thinking we're implementing a universal definition of freedom, while picking and choosing our freedoms carefully in practice.
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Why is it that you aren't President? Because that was a hell of a lot more insightful than anything pretty well any President since like Jefferson has ever said.
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Your post triggered me to look up the whole pledge of allegiance thing, since the very concept has always seemed quite alien to me. Now, the funny thing is that according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], not only was the pledge written by a damn socialist, he didn't even put in the words "under god", which had to be officially added in the 1950's!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to call Glenn Beck, the US public school system is indoctrinating children with socialist values! Oh, wait...
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When I was younger, 40 odd years ago, I used to wonder why America was considered a bastion of freedom. Possession of certain plants were highly illegal, being a communist was illegal, kids who went to the States for a year of schooling came back with stories about having to swear allegiance to the flag every day much like in a dictatorship. Black people were finally being allowed to use the same washrooms as white people. They could with a straight face have a constitution which stated all men were equal and allowed slavery.
America always seemed like the ultimate example of successful propaganda.
Really, blacks couldn't use the same restrooms as whites in the 70's?
Damn, here I thought that was all back in the 50s...