Copyright legislation. Yee haw. There’s nothing that perks up our Sparky ears like talk of new copyright laws for Canada.
Betamax tapes were still on video store shelves the last time the laws were changed. But after a couple of failed attempts, the federal government is expected to take another try at addressing digital rights management. http://cot.ag/dvoaJz
How much do you think about copyright? Will this change the way you manage your music, movies, tv shows, photos and other digital possessions? In short, how do you think this will change your life?
We want to hear from you and play some of your thoughts on the air. Call us at 1-877-34-SPARK (1-877-347-7275 toll free in Canada).
*Original image by mikeblogs
I care. I don't think the majority of people really do. I mention it to people all the time, they don't seem to concerned by the possible changes. Really are the changes going to do anything to what is done now? People are still going to tape shows on the PVR, watch TV online, Rip CD's and DVD's. What ever changes are made, people will always overcome them and work around the issues.
I suspect most people don't even realise that their current usage of VCR's and PVRs is currently infringing in Canada. While time shifting is legal in the USA with their "weaker" copyright, it isn't legal in Canada.
The previous Bill C-61 made it clear that it was illegal if a contract or technical measure was present, while making the less likely scenarios (no contracts or technical measures) legal.
In other words, it "legalised" activities which a majority of Canadians already thought was legitimate and legal in Canada, and for which nobody had ever been sued. It offered average Canadians nothing, but took a lot from them in return.
I care. I'm concerned that the new laws will make it illegal for consumers/citizens to modify technology that they own, such as installing new software on an iPhone that isn't approved by Apple, or on any similar device. This will give corporations more control over our modes of communication by restricting what we can see and do, restrict access to functionality of devices, and restrict innovation. In the case of mobile phones, it will limit consumers access to alternate mobile carriers because it will be illegal to circumvent the SIM card lock. We are already tethered to our mobile providers with three year contracts common on most Canadian cell plans and things will likely get worse.
Though I care about my copyright laws, I feel that I'm not as educated as I should or would like to be. I do feel that these new laws show that, A.) We need to have more technologically sound people in our government and, B.) These laws are being put in place more to protect sellers and their revenue instead of the 'artist' or 'maker' of the product.
What worries me is that if laws like these are put into effect, what will be next? ISP throttling? In some countries a person can loose their internet and even be fined simply because an ISP believes (with no actual proof) that you are torrenting data.
However it is up to us as the consumer to be aware and understand our rights as we progress further into our digital world.
From the perspective of a communications studies student, what I see is not the seizing of mere media ownership on digital devices, I've also noticed that major companies are also trying to monopolize the modes of production. Having power over the modes of production/distribution is a central tenant of cultural studies, since that's a pretty big core of our way of life.
An example of this is deviantArt. Hidden deep in that long and mangled Terms of Service is a clause where to share your artwork using dA you need to lease them full rights. Once something has its rights leased once, it becomes diffcult to use it in other media. I suspect this is why most authors never post their full writings online. Presses and magazines need to buy serial rights; but if you've already relinquished full rights to something to a web service, then you have nothing to sell them.
I'm worried that if this continues, there will no longer be any artists, writers, or musicians. Normal people of talent won't have any reason to distribute their creations because the system will be designed so that they would 1) need to be embedded with whoever is in the mode of production/distribution in the first place, and 2) they would rarely see any form of profit from it since their producers seize most of the money. While people might worry a lot about the latter reason, if an artist needs to become embedded in an industry system in order to access the tools of production, then a version of the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model will come into effect and start censoring everything.
That said, I'm still not as much in the loop as I'd like to be. Keeping oneself informed with legislative matters has a very high difficulty curve. I can only trust unembedded experts such as Cory Doctorow or even Mr. McOrmond to do so for me, yet the news is seldom good.
Copyright already complicates my life, and the new legislation will make this worse rather than better. I'm blind, and I use either braille or text-to-speech software to access nearly all printed information. While electronic versions of books are now produced, the DRM employed by publishers and EBook readers makes it impossible to access the books with adaptive technology. When the idea of adding text-to-speech capabilities to EBook readers was suggested, publishers fought it down based on the fear that text-to-speech would negatively impact audio book sales. (The two formats actually have very little in common, but the publishing industry hasn't done enough research to figure that out.) While I hoped that changes to copyright legislation would enhance accessibility for print disabled readers, it appears that I'm still stuck buying hard copy books, cutting off the spines, scanning them, and running them through optical character recognition. (Which is also illegal but hard to restrict.) I have no problem with purchasing the media I use legally, but if the producers of such media aren't going to play well with others, we'll eventually be forced to learn to hack the DRM.
Woah. Seriously? The DRM is so strict you can't even access the text itself? That's asinine. I offer my sympathies, if it means anything.
"Canadian copyright law is already pretty messed up, where specific institutions are given exceptions to copyright rather than copyright being appropriately
limited to allow those with different senses to acquire their own technological assistance and be legally protected in using them."
The mere fact that someone else knows this makes me smile. In the US, a company called BookShare has created a system where actual users who need to scan books can pool resources, so we don't all have to scan the same book. One must have a print disability to qualify, and one must pay a membership fee. The books are digitally watermarked to link copies with those who download them, but they can be used on any adaptive device. Of course, due to copyright legislation, the system is unavailable to residents of Canada, and starting a similar system here is currently impossible. Even starting a repository where universities can share copies of text books they've needed to transcribe for students with disabilities has been an arduous process.
I suppose what I'd love the actual copyright holders to understand is that while I'd be happy to purchase an EBook, there are plenty of ways for me to obtain the book without paying for it in order to avoid the DRM. Many popular books are available in unsecured formats as torrents, for example, and these I can easily make accessible. What I'm interested to see next is the way Apple will deal with EBooks once their book store is available on the iPhone. Apple's technology is Universal Design, meaning that they've incorporated a screen reader directly into their products. This screen reader will read public domain books, but it remains to be seen whether or not Apple will actually disable the screen reader's access to copyrighted content. (Even though it will have been purchased by the user, and will be read on the device as they want it to be.)
A final note: these problems will only get worse in Canada, where even such basic concepts as accessible library collections are under threat. The only accessible library is currently run by a charity, which has announced that it will be getting out of the library business. There's currently an argument underway as to which organization or level of government should take over the management of accessible library collections. This, combined with copyright's restrictions on alternative formats, means that unless some action is taken, increasing numbers of print disabled Canadians are going to have an exceedingly difficult time just reading a book.
I care. The Canadian government is selling out to big business, sacrificing the freedoms of individual Canadians in order to prop up outmoded business models. It's disgusting.
Spark should interview University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist on this: http://www.michaelgeist.ca
It may be a bit much for most people to want to read, but I'm doing a clause-by-clause analysis at http://billc32.ca/rwm-clause
Our front-page for the bill is http://billc32.ca . Other words work in front, so some people are saying http://fix.billc32.ca or http://Kill.BillC32.ca
I know that quite well. What I was more specifically referring to is how the DRM actually rendered the purpose of the media – being able to read a book – useless. Like advertising, DRM runs off of an unwritten social contract. For advertising, it is given because the audience is getting something without properly paying for it. This is why we commonly to accept advertisements on television, but not in video games, books, public billboards, and (depending on your bandwidth rates) on the Internet. DRM functions (theoretically) as a method to prevent infinite duplication in place of not having a physical presence (usually a storebought CD), while at the same time still allowing for full functionality. Such is the social contract under which DRM is presented — if only it could keep it.
This specific case is where the DRM itself nullifies the functionality of the software. This has affected other spheres as well; certain video games (Assassin's Creed 2 comes to mind) has it where the DRM would make people who have limited bandwidth or are on dialup connections (such as most of Northern Ontario) unable to play the game. These are entirely predictable cases where the DRM infringes upon its own reason for existing in the first place.
This law does not protect consumers against misuse by manufacturers. There’s no protection against a camera applying manufacturer’s DRM (and copyright claim) against personal recording, nothing to ensure any DRM usage is sufficiently secure (CSS encoding on DVDs is not for instance), nothing to protect personal producers. If a bank were to use DRM to protect its site and claim violation against break in – it certainly would not protect its customers nor people who are legally testing their security. DRM users MUST be held responsible for the security of their products.
That said, I’m otherwise ok with the rest. The DRM restrictions are…. unsafe.
I am a language teacher.
I teach English to Francophones in Quebec. My students live in a world of English media that whizzes by them too fast for them to understand. To help them figure out how meaning is encoded in English, one strategy I use is to capture some of the audio, video, or text as it whizzes past, slow it down, and get the students work on their perception and prediction skills.
To do my job well, I often see the need to chop up a podcast, extract a scene from a DVD, or record a streaming video or song. Why? To make it more fully comprehensible and pedagogically sound, and to protect the hours/days of work I put in to my lessons from being wasted when a link expires or the DVD gets scratched. I need to protect my work, too.
In short, I need access to the insides of the digital media that is flooding our culture so that I can help my students make sense of it, engage with it, and develop the linguistic competence needed to meet the 95% threshold of comprehension that they theoretically need to be able to guess the 5% that they don't understand.
I don't sell it. My students don't pay. I put all the modified media inside a password protected area of a website, I restrict download as best as I can, and I try to use DVDs or CDs that I own when that is possible, though often it is not. I do not make a high salary, and I do not want the practice of educating people using advanced techniques made illegal.
What I do is magic. I can take a group of 28 teenagers who have been completely alienated from the most useful second language on the planet and make them love it.
I care.
You say: By submitting your comments you acknowledge that CBC has the right to reproduce, broadcast and publicize those comments or any part thereof in any manner whatsoever.
I claim the same right to reproduce, broadcast and publicize what has been submitted to my radio, TV and computer–and why not?
I care, but I'm frustrated and don't have a lot of hope. Rational copyright laws would make things like fanfiction and fanart legal and would let instructors and librarians email content to students who need it without barriers. There are two camps (largely): people who know and realize how terribly restricted they are from doing really productive, helpful things, and people who don't have a clue and think that as long as they scan the image from the book themselves, they can re-publish it with attribution, and as long as there's a password lock on that copied article/song/movie, it's okay. Copyright =/= common sense.
Part 1
I see the repression happening and coming down and I am prepared for the worst possible fascist world. They won't get a dime or any co-operation or any interference with my life. I have prepared my own music , book and video library, I am set for life and I am prepared to bunker down. I don't need to hear any new music, listen to the radio use the internet even go to the library. I still do some of these things but I have weaned myself of most of it and am prepared to go cold turkey when the copyright crunch comes, So I will be safe until the 451 squad breaks in my door. And even after that I shall zen like content myself with studying the dust patterns on the floor.
I intend to bunker up. I'm going to ground, disappearing from the entertainment news political propaganda world. . I won't exist, and neither will they.
I shall achieve the zen state of No-News Mind.
I have found the solution to New Age Fascism – to be content with little or with nothing. Tell the fascists they can take their world and shove it.
Please, the rest of you – give them your money, your lives and your souls – they need victims – while they are devouring you they will be ignoring me.
Oh, relax, don't worry about the future – there is none.
This bill is attempting to fix a problem that is completely out of control and apparently beyond comprehension…kind of like the huge BP oil spill in the Gulf! The future is in streaming content. Industry should probably get that under control now before it too spins away. All that bill will do is start a useless market for content that is more copyable than others. Most "locks" and infringed uploaded content that Canadians consume are perpetrated out of country. I doubt we'll see a lot of fines and court cases against individuals though, which is a good thing! Industry should stop trying to beat up the people they want to be friends with.
What digital content copyright holders really need and are really, really going to need in the future is revenue from streaming content. The Industry needs to directly tax isp's for content streamed. It could be monitored and partially paid for by the websites that stream the content as well as the consumers of the content. Yet if history is a teacher than it will probably be after they force bands to sue their fans and a huge movie studio takes a college student to court for millions…again.
- @maddadam
Laurence Lessig, "Free Culture." Read it.
@maddadam "This bill is attempting to fix a problem that is completely out of control and apparently beyond comprehension"
I'm curious which problem you are referring to, and how you feel this bill is attempting to fix it? From my summary of the bill: http://BillC32.ca/rwm-clause
"Many copyright holders point to the rise in the use of new communications technologies like the Internet as being the source of their problems. Along with these new technologies came various technological measures that were marketed to copyright holders, some which are helpful and some which are very harmful to the interests of copyright holders. Most of the statistics used to indicate losses do not differentiate between losses due to infringement and losses due to unintended consequences from misunderstood and misapplied technological measures."
What I see is a very serious problem which Bill C-32 will only make worse.
Please also see also the additional commentary I added to things said in an interview I did last week on the Business News Network http://billc32.ca/blog
You bet I care.
I format shift and copy my CD's and DVD's so that I can pull them from a media server without a need to swap them in and out of a player. 99 times out of 100, that requires circumventing a digital lock in place on the disc to prevent just that.
The music and movie industry would much rather force me to pay twice. Once for the DVD, and once for the digital 'soft-copy.'
They day I pay twice for the same item is the day I come out of a hospital drooling and fresh from my lobotomy.
Even if Bill C-32 is passed, I will openly defy it simply because I refuse to pay more than once for any item.
This is already happening with some Blue-Ray discs here in the US.
I think Canada should homoginize copyright laws with those in the United States. Doing so would allow the expansion of services like Hulu which I belive has the potential to replace television.
While I agree that Hulu/etc would be great in Canada, this is not a Copyright related issue. These restrictions are based in contract laws, and the business choices of the major studios. Even if we had the identical copyright act in Canada, these arbitrary non-copyright related restrictions would still exist.
Canada has been part of the International copyright system since the beginning, part of the Berne convention (WIPO treaty #1) since 1887 when we were under UK law. The United States only ratified Berne in 1989, and outside of the special interest lobbying is thought of globally as one of the weaker copyright jurisdictions that are part of the WIPO copyright system.
For more, see http://BillC32.ca/faq — part of the problem with Canada passing good copyright law is that people don't understand the history, the current state of the law, or how their particular issue fits into the legal system. Many of the problems people think are "Copyright" related (Like regional restrictions or even DRM) are actually related to contract and other laws outside of Copyright.