Documentary "Why Copyright?"
The continuing fight against Canada's own DMCA has just created a documentary film titled Why Copyright? Produced by Michael Geist and available as a stream, it is also available as a OGG download version, or a torrent. The film features Red Hat founder Bob Young, sci-fi writer Karl
Schroeder, and many other voices from across Canada.
Please spread the message along to anyone you know that is concerned about American policies and politics being brought in to Canada.
The Canadian DMCA Video Competition
Jim Prentice refusing to answer questions, just keeps shouting
Canadian Industry Minister lies about his Canadian DMCA on national radio, then hangs up
CBC Radio's Search Engine just posted/aired its interview with Canadian
Industry Minister Jim Prentice about his Canadian version of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They've been trying to get him on the
air for months now and he finally consented to ten minutes, but he
delivered nothing but spin and outright lies about his legislation and
ended up hanging up on Jesse Brown, the interviewer.
You have to listen to this -- in it, the Minister lies, dodges,
weaves and ducks around plain, simple questions like, "If the guy at my
corner shop unlocks my phone, is he breaking the law?" and "If my
grandfather breaks the DRM on his jazz CDs to put them on his iPod,
does that break the law?" and the biggie, "All the 'freedoms' your law
guarantees us can be overriden by DRM, right?" (Prentice's answer to
this last one, "The market will take care of it," is absolutely
priceless.)
So what's in the new copyright bill?
So what does the proposed copyright legislation, Bill C61, have in
store for you? Aside from not being able to download free music any
more, it puts all sorts of limitations on intellectual property and how
it can be used.
The Canadians' worst fear is that the bill has been unduly
influenced by the powerful U.S. music, movie and TV lobby, which
managed to get the U.S. Congress to pass the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, which gives corporations such as the music industry
unprecedented powers to investigate and enforce copyright law. Among
other things, the DMCA is unclear about the concept of "fair use,"
which Canada calls "fair dealing," which allows use of content for
purposes such as satire.
Canada's new copyright bill: More spin than 'win-win'
The worst thing about the bill is that it makes its own balancing
provisions irrelevant. The bill essentially says that technology trumps
whatever rights consumers or competitors might have otherwise had. So
the law no longer matters. People only have whatever rights content
owners choose for them.
For instance, if the CD you're now
allowed to shift to your iPod is technologically locked down, then,
well, sorry -- you're completely out of luck. Try to circumvent the
access and copy controls, and the well-publicized provision to limit
damages to $500 for noncommercial infringements no longer applies.
You're on the hook for up to $20,000 per infringement, which is
actually $60,000 per song by the time you account for the composer,
performer and record label. Multiply that by a dozen or so songs and
you get a sense of the damage awards really possible if this bill
becomes law.
Canadian DMCA is worse than the American one
Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his answer to the
American Digital Millennium Copyright Act today as planned, and it's
even worse
than the US DMCA. The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to
copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you
to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you
from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny,
narrow, useless exception for security research.
It used to be that Parliament got to write copyright law. Now, it's
Hollywood companies, who get to overrule Parliamentary law with
whatever "business rules" they put in their DRM.
This draconian american style dmca needs to be stopped!
The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable
Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and
Official Languages, and Minister for La Francophonie, will deliver
brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling
of a bill to amend the Copyright Act. Members of the media will
also be able to attend a technical briefing and lock-up prior to the
tabling of the bill to amend the Copyright Act.
Find ways you can help stop this here from previous posts.
Stop the american lobbyist movement to change our laws!!!
