The Occasional Solipsist

So the pressure from the US lobbies looks like it might finally cause Canadian copyright laws to change. For the much, much worse.

Apparently in an effort to impress his asshole friend George Bush, Stephen Harper is backing a bill that is so strict as to be ludicrous. If passed it will make the US' DMCA law look tame by comparison. And tell that to the 20,000 Americans who have been sued.

I am not at all ashamed to be a 'downloader'. There are those who believe that the online dissemination of files, music, video and applications is immoral, and in some cases illegal. I don't. And I certainly don't feel that the downloading of a work that I would not purchase if it weren't freely available otherwise constitutes any kind of fraud. If I do want to own a product enough, I buy it. If I'm just kind of interested, I'll download it. Simple as that. Due to that policy, filesharing has opened my eyes to many different works that I have subsequently gone out and purchased that I would otherwise never have heard of. And why there have to be lines drawn between use of the internet to download content and the copying of it via other means (a television program for example, via a vcr or pvr) is beyond me. But maybe that too will change if Mr. Harper has his way with this bill.

Here's a link to a list of what Canadians can do, and for those in the lazier crowd (like me) here's a quick and easy site that fills out a letter to your MP decrying this nonsense. All you have to do is pick your province and your MP and click send. Don't let this be one of those case where you could have done something and didn't and then complain about it later.

Labels: everything else, rants, tech