Canada’s Conservative government has tabled a new copyright bill (a proposed law). Bill C-32 contains a provision to prevent the legalization of most of the rights it purports to be enshrining. The DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection provisions in Bill C-32 would trump Canadian citizen’s rights on a number of fronts.
Listen to Nora Young of CBC’s Spark talking to CBC’s Peter Nowak about Bill C-32 |MP3|.
After listening to the segment it sounds to my like Bill C-32 is a hipper, slicker version of Bill C-61. The question is will better talking points be enough for it to get through? I sure hope not. Bill C-32 means…
-We’ll have to say goodbye to fair dealing (using portions of copyrighted material in your own work). Circumventing what the government is calling “TPMs” (technological protection measures) on copyrighted materials would not be unlawful under Bill C-32. TPM, by the way, is the new, less tarred acronym for DRM.
This is really bad folks. The most read story I’ve ever written includes a Wall-E with a “copyright criminal” sign. I photoshopped from two different copyrighted images. That’s fair dealing, right there. That image has been widely used around the net (do a search for it on TinEye.com if you’re curious).
-Goodbye format shifting! No more ripping a DVD to MP4 for your iPod. It would be legal under Bill C-32 only if your DVD didn’t have any DRM. I guess it’s just too bad that virtually every store bought DVD you’ve ever purchased has DRM on it!
Under Bill C-32 you won’t be allowed to rip your own legally owned DVDs. You’ll just have to keep buying the same movie over and over folks.
-Lawyer up if you’ve ever installed a PC game! DRM can lock out a game’s owner from their own legally purchased products.
I recently bought the Medal of Honor 10th Anniversary Bundle (at Future Shop), I played through the first two games in the series only to discover the fourth (Medal of Honor: Airborne) had a bad install on my Vista machine. I entered the activation code three times, and was locked out. I had to download a keygen to make my own game work.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Canadian Copyright Bill C-32 Released from Copyright C-32 on Vimeo.
In my new article, “Modernization of the Inconceivable”, at http://mincov.com/articles/index.php/fullarticle/modernization_of_the_inconceivable/ (http://bit.ly/8YQZ3r), I explain why modernization of the copyright law based on compromise and concessions, without a good understanding of the underlying principles of copyright protection, is doomed to fail.
Copyright laws exist either for the protection of the creator, or for the benefit of the public. There is no middle ground. As long as we keep entrusting the government (any government) to find the right “balance” between the two, we are destined to keep on making up exclusions from limitations on exceptions from the rights – without even stopping for a second to question why we are doing this.
It seems Bill C-32 may be against Article 27-2 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
And section 1 as well:
“(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
This is insanity. How corrupt is our government to allow this to even be considered? The world is worried about being green and at every turn someone thinks of a new way to create even more waste.
Why is my government allowing greedy corporations to rob us and generate more garbage when the world is trying to reduce waste? Canada has no middle class left. We are either poor or we are rich and we will be forced even poorer or have no cheap sources of entertainment left.
Ontario’s highway 407 is a provincial embarrassment. We allowed our taxes to build something on Canadian soil then sold it to a foreign corporation that charges us per kilometre to use it. People are consistently billed wrongly or billed when they’ve never used it leaving them with no way to dispute the erroneous charges and they get transferred from one finger pointer to another but eventually give up and pay the extortion fees or forcefully have their license plates suspended by the ministry. Now they want to do the same with internet. Billing by the byte for bandwidth use is just pure greed. Cell phone companies started this way and have evolved to much better service and plans by doing the opposite with unlimited plans instead. The Internet Meter would be a complete step backwards to allow billing by the byte. This insane idea we would limit the internet to the rich only eventually. The schools, the poor and the middle class would be drastically limited to internet access and any form of online entertainment like movie rentals, online radio, Skype and other online chatting and online gaming would be no longer an option to anyone but the rich. There is no reason to allow these greedy companies to charge for the internet by the byte. There is absolutely nothing good that will come of this. Canada prided itself on being a high tech nation and this draconian scheme would put us back in the dark ages and reduce our national internet use to that of a third world nation.
When compact discs were first introduced they were better quality made and the majority of them had a protective teflon type coating to reduce scratches. Now we have poorly made discs that scratch very easily. We won’t be able to use tools to make a copy to protect our investment. Instead we will have to buy a new copy of a movie or music disc every time they get scratched because of poorly made players or from kids or any number of things that can damage the disc. And instead of reducing waste we fill our landfill sites needlessly with more garbage from things we have paid for again and again because greedy politicians and corporations don’t care about anything but selling their products and lining their pockets. The crooked politicians try to sell you that it is a good law to protect copyrights when they know full well it won’t or don’t care because they are getting kickbacks to turn a blind on yet another nickel and dime scheme to further erode the middle class and to keep any source of entertainment unreachable to the poorer.
I can record my TV shows or movies from my cable box onto a VCR and watch them later. What difference is there between that and watching TV shows online and recording it for later? Even more so what difference is there to sharing it? It was broadcast publicly already on public air waves and anyone could have watched it. Sharing TV shows would only increase the marketing potential for any show.
I can record music I hear on the radio onto cassette tapes and make my own collection of music but I cannot record my music from online radio to my computer? If I purchase an album online or at the store why cannot I make a backup onto my computer so I can listen to it there? I paid for the music. I am not selling it or sharing. I just want to be able to play my music unhindered on whatever device I choose to listen to it through.
Please, someone for the love of god wake up the politicians that the working class in Canada cannot afford to keep getting gouged at every creative scheme greedy corporations can think of to squeeze more money from us.
The only people that will benefit from this new copyright law are the people making counterfeit music and movie discs along with the greedy corporations forcing people to do without or fill our landfill sites needlessly.
Thank you for your time,
Paul.B
What ?? If i buy Cd i can do what i want with it , convert it to mp3 as i always do and lisen to it where ever i like , NO ONE going to make me do it differently !
Maybe I just stop paying for all the stuff and download everything for free !
I’m confused… so if it’ll be illegal to break TPR’s so as to be able to upload on a P2P file sharing site – how will that stop people from downloading things posted by those in other countries? Sure, the initial single uploader might have broken the TPR’s [whether that’s even an issue in their country] but those downloading in Canada had nothing to do with that initial part of the process.
Remember – sharing is caring. “Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea”.