Well, Federal Conservative Minister of Industry Jim “Fucknuts” Prentice tabled yesterday the bill I mentioned a few weeks ago. And it’s bad. Bad for ordinary Canadians. Bad for Canadian businesses. And, like most legislation crafted, essentially, by paid industry lobbyists, Bill C-61 is hugely one-sided in its “protections” for copyright holders and only superficially attractive to Canadian consumers.
Oh, sure, you’ll be able to timeshift your favourite television shows using an electronic device. But if you share that material or if you keep it for longer than the bill allows, you’ll be breaking the law. Remember that DVD you bought in Italy last year, discovered you couldn’t play on your home DVD player, so you went out and bought a new, region-free (or hacked) player? You’re gonna be a criminal.
How about if you’re a business distributing digital entertainment online, with proper licensing from the creator and legal owner? Criminal! At least, you’ll be a criminal if you used any means to bypass the digital locks placed on the original materials. Rip a locked CD or a locked DVD to your iPod or Zune? If you bypass copy protection to do so, you’re a criminal. It’ll be illegal to distribute software or technologies to circumvent copy protections, too.
And all of this is what happens when politicians who know fuck-all about technology are advised and manipulated by corporations which short-sightedly refused to enter into the digital-media distribution fray until far too late. This is what happens when Canadian politicians who know fuck-all about the legitimate uses of technology take their orders from corporations south of the border.
Read much more at Michael Geist’s Blog for the best run-down of everything you can expect:
I’ve obviously written a lot about Canadian copyright and copyright reform, but in my view it boils down to three primary concerns.
First, the bill is likely to include provisions (the anti-circumvention provisions) that have been proven to create significant harm to education, privacy protection, security research, free speech, and consumer interests. Indeed, anti-circumvention legislation trumps fair dealing, effectively eliminating crucial user rights in the digital era such as the right to use digital works without permission for research, private study, criticism, or news reporting. The government has emphasized the need to implement the WIPO Internet Treaties, however, those treaties provide far greater flexibility than what is found in the U.S. DMCA. It can meet the WIPO standard and preserve the copyright balance, but it must reject the U.S. path to do so.
Second, I’m troubled by what is not in the bill. If Canada is to amend the copyright law, then surely we ought to address issues that affect individual Canadians such as protecting parody, time shifting, device shifting, and the making of backup copies. We should eliminate crown copyright and restrict statutory damages awards to cases of commercial infringement. Yet none of this will be in the bill.
Third, I’m dismayed at the way this bill was created. The government last consulted Canadians on digital copyright issues in 2001. Technology and the Internet have changed dramatically since then, yet there have been no further consultations. Moreover, there is general recognition that this bill is chiefly the result of intense U.S. lobbying. The Industry Minister has time to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, time to meet all the major telcos on the spectrum auction issue, yet hasn’t made time to meet with user community on copyright.
Sure, you can argue that enforcing this legislation will be so enormous a task, so fraught with complications and inaccuracies and anti-snooping technologies as to render it unworthy of our outrage. You may never be charged for doing something as simple as saving a digital copy of Desperate Housewives longer than you’re allowed. But you’ll still be a criminal. And maybe you’ll be one of the handful of innocent consumers which the industry will take to court as an example.
Visit Online Rights Canada to send off a protest letter to your Member of Parliament. Stop this inane legislation.
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Yeah, and you’re a criminal if you smoke a joint or have a threesome. The government isn’t going to spend the money going after the little guys.
While that is true, it does not justify a badly-written law crafted with no apparent understanding of the legitimate, licensed means by which ordinary citizens and companies will now become criminals. And the laws you mention are largely ignored not because everyone is doing them but because there’s a general consensus that they’re stupid, outmoded legislations. This is a new law and, as such, is intended to be enforced.
This will present an interesting scenario for media conglomerates like Alliance, which produce movie content. And whose sister company, The Movie Network, takes that content, cracks the copy protection and encodes it to a hard drive for broadcast. Criminals! In our house!
What I find interesting is that Canadians who have always been sheep-5 years in jail for delivering a letter cheaper than Canada Post, government monopoly on alcohol sales in most provinces etc.-are wound up about copyright. Do you represent a groundswell of outrage, or a small group of articulate people? Will this slip by quietly?
I’m not sure I understand your point. Canadians shouldn’t be concerned about this retarded Bill because there are other retarded legislations?
Point is, this Bill will criminalize practically every Canadian with a digital copy of some copyrighted work, however legitimately is was acquired. And it will open to scrutiny our private file-sharing activities, however legal they might be.
Can I ask for a point of clarification here? I’ve been seeing a lot about this in the blogosphere lately, including dire predictions of iPods being confiscated at the border, etc.
Am I correct in assuming that current laws contain none of this nonsense? If I show up at the Canadian border, say next Saturday on my way to Toronto Pride (YAY!), will my b/f’s iPod be safe?
Everything you do on your computer is open to scutiny. You posted a pic of yourself with a porn star and, I think, a director earlier. Do you have a way of asking them what they think? Nettwork Records in Canada has been unconcerned about copyright, Prince is vigilant about it. We never hear the porn producers side of it.
@ marc: Never you worry, lad, it’s just a proposal and our legislators are just about to take the summer off. When they come back in the autumn, it might not get passed, it might be changed and there might be a call for an election and get lost.
@ snotty: “We never hear the porn producers side of it.”
You could not be more wrong. I hear the porn producers’ side of it every single day I go to work. And I posted those photos after specifically asking permission to do so. And, besides, even if I had not, they were at a public function, not private, and I was completely within my legal right to do so.
I assure you that Bruce Cam — the producer/director you mention — scours the Intertubes for every mention of his company, and if he didn’t like what I wrote, he’d contact me posthaste. He has my number and I have his. Titan also very aggressively prosecutes real criminals, not those created with Prentice’s dumbass bill.
I’m not questioning your right to post a pic, you obviously have a relationship with them. But doesn’t the new bill (supposedly) prevent someone from uploading a Titan movie, maybe before it’s official release, and flying to Hong Kong or Montreal and running off copies to sell illegally? Isn’t that what the airport/border search is about?
I’m sure you said a lot of important things in this post, but I was so distracted by new “hulk” picture on your blog, that my licking it got in the way of my reading.
@ snotty: The whole airport/border search aspect is still unclear. What was actually tabled is not the same as what was leaked a couple of months ago. Regarding your example, let’s use a nonporn case. Marvel Studios makes The Incredible Hulk. Months from now, some asshole steals a prerelease DVD and makes hundreds of copies, selling them to make a profit. Illegal. As it should be.
But how about The Movie Network, three months after that, when the DVD comes out? They license the content from Marvel Studios at a hefty fee for broadcast. They get the DVD from Marvel Studios (or their distributor), rip it to their servers and enter it into their schedule…
Illegal.
Yes, illegal. Because when they use technology to crack the DVD protection to encode it to their servers, they’ll break this stupid, shortsighted law. It doesn’t matter if you paid for it and have permission from the studio. Only if they provided you with unprotected media are you allowed to repurpose it. This is the “circumvention” part of the legislation and it reveals a breathtaking ignorance of the legitimate use of digital media.
@ cb: Notice how I bring the whole Hulk thing full-circle? It’s an art, I know. Of course, won’t this look silly when my avatar changes?
i guess my years taking criminal 101 have finally paid off.
i’m disgusted that the US can influence us, this after we harbored all the planes on 9/11, and when bush called Mexico his #1 trading partner.
*insert redneck joke here*
thank god i have a website nobody can touch.
The bill still has to go through the House, the Senate, maybe the courts. Won’t that process take into account the TMN example you provided and maybe change it?
I’d like to say “we can only hope”, but we can actually do more than that. Michael Geist suggests many, many avenues to pursue, as does Online Rights Canada, both links above.
Of course, even if it does pass in it’s current, ridiculous form, the very first case, if challenged, could cause it to be struck down. It’s not sensible to issue a panic call because, as you say, it’s a long, long way from being law, but this shit ain’t right, and it should be addressed.
I don’t think it’s particularly safe to look at a bad law that’s under consideration and say “well, it probably won’t be enforced”. Because:
a) probably isn’t definitely, and there’s a balance of “oh shit son” there I wouldn’t want to deal with
b) if it’s not enforced, what the hell is the point of it, in this case?
It becomes yet another law that can be used to fuck with you if you piss someone off. A law that will effectively make just about every person who’s embraced the digital age A Criminal even if under current law they have done absolutely nothing illegal. Enforced on everybody? Hell no. But if you annoy someone with the power to send police on witch hunts, or if you try to cross the border and you look a bit funny? They can do this shit and claim it’s The Law.
Seriously, saying “oh well, it probably won’t matter” is a bad way to react to bad law.
“But how about The Movie Network, three months after that, when the DVD comes out? They license the content from Marvel Studios at a hefty fee for broadcast. They get the DVD from Marvel Studios (or their distributor), rip it to their servers and enter it into their schedule…
Illegal.”
But surely that can’t be how the Movie Network encodes films to their server - they don’t rip them illegally from DVD’s do they? I’d think it’s more likely that they’ll recieve a copy on video (digibeta or HDCam or whatever format the film is in) from the distributor which is then loaded into their system. That copy will be a promotional copy, to be specifically used for that purpose. They won’t be breaking any laws in doing that.
You’re absolutely correct, Alice, in your assumption that larger organizations like TMN will ask for — and get — unlocked versions of movies, whatever the format. But there will undoubtedly be material that does not arrive in an unlocked form. More than likely a smaller distributor will simply supply the same DVD which goes out to stores. All it takes is one unlock for the law to be broken, right?
And smaller versions of TMN simply won’t have the clout to receive digiBeta originals.
Be careful to delete all the material on your iPod before you give it away to a friend when you upgrade yourself, too. Or you’ll be breaking the law.
@ Sami: I agree wholeheartedly.
Alice, I agree that the Movie Network is an unlikely culprit in this scenario–but smaller digital specialty channels like Drive-In and Scream and a few others seem to run some of their more obscure movies right off the DVD (and possibly even a few videocassettes).
Prentice and pals also talk about this bill as if it protects “the creator” and “the artist”. However, the reality is that when it comes to music, film, video and other audiovisual media, it is all too often the case that the copyright rests not with the creator but with the large media conglomerate that ultimately owns and markets the product.
The proposed legislation does not, in the majority of circumstances, help the creator or the artist; it does not help honest consumers, who are of the mindset that they are *purchasing* DVDs and CDs and other audiovisual materials and not *licensing* them; and, most importantly, the proposed legislation does almost nothing to prevent the kind of international industrial-scale privacy that genuinely does affect the film, video and recording industry that isn’t already done by existing laws.
This legislation, if passed, would exist almost entirely to harass and on occasion prosecute ordinary people who want to make use of their DVDs, CDs, e-books, audiobooks, computer games and so on without having to repurchase those items for every format, or find them to be useless when large media organizations cease to support certain formats or change the rules of usage. It is not our role to take responsibility (or the blame) for someone else’s failing or failed business model.
It is not up to us to shore up the profits of these companies by having to purchase a given CD for every person in the household who wants one instead of sharing it among us; or who wants to transfer a DVD that they already legally own to a laptop or an iPod so that they can watch it on the plane. Sure, “creators” and–more realistically–copyright owners have a right to protect their products from attempts by others to profit from their works…but if a CD or computer game that I’ve legally purchased destroys my hard drive with a rootkit or secretly transfers information back to ‘home base’ about who I am, what equipment I’m using and what other files I have, the last thing I want to hear about is that this is what the company has to do to “protect itself from piracy.”
One of my favourite games from the past few years is the bestselling Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords–not only because it’s an excellent game if you like space strategy type things, but because the creators (who, for a change, *are* the copyright owners) have a unique and refreshing view about copy protection. This is from that game’s Q&A:
Q: Galactic Civilizations I got some attention because you didn’t have any CD copy protection. Aren’t you afraid of piracy?
A: Our primary concern is our customers – the people who pay my salary. They’re my overlord and I don’t want to inconvenience them. Moreover, piracy is really about how many sales are actually lost. What we do is put out free updates after release. We got Editor’s Choice Awards from most of the major game magazines for the original Galactic Civilizations, and that was on the 1.0 version in the box. However, we put out tons of updates after release that greatly enhanced that experience.
So let’s say someone got a “warez” copy. If they like the game, they’re going to want the updates, and to do that, they have to have a valid serial number that is verified on the server side (i.e., no cracks). So at that point, we’re going to get that sale or we would have never gotten the sale.
I don’t like game companies treating me like a criminal. If I’m paying $50 for a game then I better well be able to put it on my laptop and PC and not have to futz around with keeping track of the CD. Besides, I end up losing my CDs anyway.
(Incidentally, this game was a huge hit when it was released–thanks to millions of legal purchases by millions of honest–and respected, not criminalized–consumers.)
It keeps getting crazier.
I find myself pondering this as I download some TV content via P2P software. The illegality of this is questionable, since it’s stuff for which *no* legal, paid-for source currently *exists*. Welcome to the world of “fansubs”, where foreign-language content is translated and distributed by fans until such time as official English-language versions become available, if it ever does; the native studios tend to be fine with this, as it increases the fanbase for their product at such time as they actually release their own foreign-market editions.
No doubt this will also be a highly criminal act under the new Canadian laws, which will be to no-one’s benefit at all.