Thursday, June 3, 2010

Canadians Gets Screwed by new Copyright Laws

piracy Oh boy.

Canadians for the most part have fared well against the crazy US style copyright laws, but it appears that will now change. Yesterday Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore tabled a bill to reform Canada’s out dated copyright laws, which included many compromises for both consumers and creators. The only problem is that there will be no flexibility on DRMed content.

According to these new laws Canadians will be free to make copies of content for personal use. The trouble comes if the content has any type of copy protection or DRM (Digital rights management) on it, as the new laws do not provide any provisions for breaking the DRM. Meaning that Canadians will lose all rights to make copies of content that has DRM on it, even if it’s for their own personal use. So if you planned on converting your CD collection over to MP3s and your CD’s have DRM on them, you will be out of luck. For the most part any CD that you buy today will come with DRM on it, so you will not be able to make copies of any new CD that you buy.

This is really terrible. I understand why they are doing this since a lot of people have stopped buying music and movies since it’s so freely available for free online, but stopping people from being able to copy for backups or personal use really is a bit much.

I can understand this change from the stand point that they need to do something to slow down piracy, but it just makes me feel like not buying. I like buying CDs for the higher quality sound and converting them to AACs or MP3s, but these new rules will prevent me from doing this. Add to that, that these rules will open that door for copyright holders to sue vendors of software that break copyright, and thus we may end up with no way to really back up.

I applaud these guys for trying, but there must be another solution. Just what that is, I don’t know.

VIA

No comments:

Post a Comment