Canadians Gets Screwed by new Copyright Laws

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

Should Laws Protect Virtual Property?

With our lives being increasingly moving online, I've been left with the question of whether or not governments should be passing laws to protect our online property.   Especially, as we consider recent events.

For anyone that has been on Digg in the last couple of weeks you would have read the story of David Airey. How he went on vacation to India and found out that  someone had stolen his Domain for his business' website, using a vulnerability in gmail, and held it hostage for money. In the case of David he was able to get back his domain thanks to the Digg readers getting involved. But if they had not he would have had to go to court and gotten them to freeze his account, as his service provider Go Daddy wasn't going to return account without him going though the courts. Now in the real world, if someone steals your house you would call the police and they would investigate, but online it almost seems like a no mans land right now.  Where there is no set state of Law. Then again,  maybe in the case of David he would have had to go to court to dispute his case in the real world as well,  given the fact that the hacker, using David's e-mail address, actually followed Go Daddy's policy for transferring ownership of a domain over to someone else.

Another incident that happened recently online was that one of the host (Randy Deluxe) from The Instance World of Warcraft Podcast had his World of Warcraft account stolen from him by a hacker (probably using a key logger), who liquidated his characters and mailed all of his money(gold) and items to someone else on the server.  Which is kind of crappy, but this hacker (or cracker to be specific) also, liquidated his guild bank,  which contained money and items from not just him but other players in his guild also.  So not only do you lose control of your account, but he had to explain to all of his guild members why he emptied the guild bank.  

Now someone might be reading this and saying why should we protect virtual property since it isn't real?  Because there is real value to that property and when it is stolen (I believe) that psychologically it probably has the same effect that theft in the real world causes.  For David it was his business that was stolen from under him,  and thus his livelihood.   For Randy Deluxe, it was hours of his time that he spent on his characters to collect items and gold that was wasted.  Time that if measured could be turned into real dollars and cents based on what he feel his time is worth.  

In the future, we might primarily socialize and do business online.  At lest that is the way that we are heading.  So I feel that it is important to protect what is already up there. Then again,  maybe you disagree.