Lobbyists beat Democracy and Reason on Copyright

by danaoshiroMichael Giest's sources say the prime minister’s office has decided to ignore the copyright consultations and huge evidence that Canada is not piracy haven, and essentially resubmit bill C-61, a piece of legislation even more restrictive on Canadians rights than the DMCA. It seems lobbyists can cancel out democracy and reason in Canadian politics.

The government asked for Canadians opinions on copyright law in 2009 and received a stronger, larger, and more unequivocal response than almost any public consultation in recent history. Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant called it "unprecedented" and Industry Canada claimed it was a "tremendous success". But apparently the opinion of the public, interest groups, and rights holders don't make a difference because the government is choosing to ignore the consultation.

To show just how much Canadians and Canadian businesses are against this, the final tally was 6138 submissions against C-61, and 54 in support. That isn't even a debate, that's a blowout. I can't think of any other policy question you could ask the public and get 99.13% of respondents on one side of the issue. You could get a larger portion of the population to agree to raising taxes by 10% than you could to agree to C-61.

Add to that the reality that Canada is already harder on piracy then many countries. In fact, by the Business Software Alliance's own numbers, piracy is declining in Canada. Our music industry is healthier than the US or Japan. And we're one of only a few countries in the world where you can get jail time for using a camcorder in a movie theater, and probably the only one in the world to have actually convicted a guy on that law.

But that's not enough for the big content distributors. They want a giant legal stick to club Canadian citizens with at random. They want it to be strong enough to push people into jail or bankruptcy, and versatile enough to be applied to anyone with little or no judicial oversight. They want their broken business model protected by federal law in the hopes that won't have to adapt to a world where distribution is free.

Thing is, it won't work. Despite 3 strikes laws being passed in France and Britain, piracy has still increased. And when the music industry sent out 30,000 letters in the UK threatening law suits if the accused didn't immediately pay thousands in protection money, few paid, it turned into a PR nightmare, and piracy still increased. Jamie Thomas got slapped with a very public judgment of $1.9 million in damages for sharing 24 songs, and piracy still increased. The only difference is that a few dozen people have had their lives destroyed because they got Lilo and Stitch 17 off of Limewire.

The reason none of these punitive or deterrent actions make an impact is because, like I've said before, the internet makes non-commercial copyright an impossible fantasy, and probably invalidates all digital copyright entirely.

by skreuzerA recent estimate showed that there will be 1.2 zettabytes of information transmitted, created, and duplicated on the internet in 2010. A zettabyte is roughly a thousand million terabytes. And over 75% of that data is a copy of other data. Not only is there no way even a tiny percentage of that stays within copyright law, but it's impossible to even consider enforcing copyright laws on that much information. Forget DRM, how do you even track and record the copyright licenses for 1.2 thousand million terabytes of data? That's an absolutely retarded idea.

Regardless, the content business and the US government have succeeded in convincing the PMO to ignore democracy, rationality, and our rights to due process. The Conservative government will resubmit C-61 to parliament in six weeks. If you have any interest in preserving your rights to rip DVDs to your computer, jailbreak your iPhone, or being free from corporate persecution for sharing an MP3, you'll send a letter to your MP and the government. I'm not going to sit here and let Disney try to shut down technological progress so they can sell Snow White DVDs for another 200 years.

Comments

[Shauna]

Good post. What a nightmare.