Saturday, December 08, 2007

Brilliant! Antoine Dufour



Here is music being promoted virally. Will this be legal if Jim Prentice gets his way?

4 comments:

Lindsay Stewart said...

well. youtube seems to be on the fritz. the famous tyler kinch has updated his post with video from the prentice open house. but in doing so he seems to have wiped out youtube. alas. lol

JJ said...

Wow, that was beautiful.

Posting examples of things that might become *extinct* under a DMCA is a great idea - music, even parodies like all that jibjab stuff -- is that safe? Etc. This is what hits people where they live, the stuff they watch every day without thinking.

Dirk Buchholz said...

How or where do we find the info on exactly what Prentice is proposing?Or do will we only know once he stands before the house on Dec 11
What I am reading here sounds pretty scary.

Lindsay Stewart said...

dirk, the exact details we won't see until the bill is presented to the house. what we do know is that it is intended to bring us in line with wipo treaty requirements. the dmca that we are all yelling about is the american law that was instituted to achieve compliance. if you can wade through the legal mumbledy bullshite thewipo is online.

it is all about the restriction of use and movement of copyright materials and opens the door to tpm (technical rights maintenance) and drm (digital rights maintenance). it makes it illegal for you to circumvent these malicious software and hardware "fixes". while not directly associated with wipo per se, both the united states and the european union enacted term extensions of copyright around the same time. this prevents more and more works from moving into the public domain. that works against the very spirit of the original idea of copyright as a balance between the interests of the creator and the interests of the larger culture.

if you go to tyler kinch's page you can see jim prentice telling people that he's been under pressure from and consulting with the many ceos who are the only ones given access and input to the shaping of this bill. your interests as a consumer have not been taken into account. my interests as a creator of written works, music and video have not been taken into account.

what we know is that prentice is working to please a specific master and it is not the people of canada. we know that there are well organized and very powerful lobbies for the music and motion picture industries and they want the right to control what you and i do with the media that resides in our digital devices. that includes the right to add their own back door to our systems allowing them to place malicious software and firmware in your equipment, either at the point of manufacture or when you add media to your devices.

we know that the dmca has resulted in more than 20,000 lawsuits against individuals and small technology companies in the states. it has allowed the major players to enact monopolistic copyright empires with rights that over ride your right to privacy and fair use. it is a corruption of the intended spirit of copyright. it is dangerous and wrong headed and if we don't stand up against it it is going to hurt a lot of people.