joe posts

Canada’s New Government (TM) is set to update our ‘lax’ copyright laws. Minister of Industry Jim Prentice is playing is cards close to his chest (I wonder why?) and torturing geeks everywhere with his cute games of you-can’t-see-the-bill-so-don’t-comment-on-it and I’m-tabling-the-bill-oh-no-I’m-not-oh-yes-I-am-oh-no-I’m-not.

But people have to comment on it because there’s really no way that Canadian consumers can benefit from any tightening of copyright restrictions. And since our oh-so transparent government is keeping consumers in the dark about this legislation – they tried to introduce the bill smack in the middle of the holiday season when people were looking the other way – it looks like the law will favour Big Media corporations over music and movie fans.

If the new legislation borrows from the USA’s DMCA, we may be looking at a situation where file-trading is essentially criminalised; where playback devices and media files are locked with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and circumvention of these locks is made illegal; where Linux users can’t play DVDs (because Linux distros don’t often buy the license to decode DVDs, instead bypassing the weak encryption); where backing up, space-shifting, or recording media for personal use is made illegal. Basically it’ll give content producers and distributors (usually big foreign companies/corporations) the right to control what you do with the things that you buy with your hard-earned money. This cheeses me off – I rarely engage in piracy but I do all kinds of home-recording and space-shifting (ie moving music from a CD to a hard drive or to an mp3 player), and have spent thousands of dollars on CDs, cassette tapes, DVDs, VHS tapes and records. I’d like to be able to play them!

If you haven’t already, read all about this issue at blogs like Michael Geist’s, and then send some mail to your MP and to minister of Industry Jim Prentice. Already The Nerds have flooded his office with email, letters and phone calls. The even confronted him at his annual Christmas party. The more people who complain, the more likely changes will be made – already he’s withdrawn the bill twice and now it won’t be introduced until 2008.