I think that's great, and if someone were to propose a system that would allow for it, I'd support it, but so far we've not seen anything that would work. To tell the folks who are currently getting robbed blind (by this I mean the creators, not the distributors), that they'll simply have to wait it out seems unfair.

I do not support PIPA/SOPA/ACTA as written because of the infringements to fair use and how wide the boundaries are around what qualifies as sufficient grounds to take action against a site. I do however support the rights of authors (and for now, distributors) to have immediate legal recourse against those who steal their property or who provide others with a means to do so.

How should IP be protected? I would start by revamping the copyright laws to something more sensible. (In what is protected, how fair use is applied and how long it is protected for.) Then proposed solutions to protect content may not seem quite so draconian. Not sure I'll see that in my lifetime though...

Hi!

This was in specific response to the "scarcity" legal defense which the pirate community likes to cite when folks say that copying movies/music is theft. When non-tangibles began to appear as items for mass distribution of sale (music/movies), the laws changed to protect them as property, even though the concept of scarcity clearly did not apply. (This happened with the first introduction of copyright/trademark etc...)

I'm not referring to the recent group of laws which intends to make fair use illegal.

I support the spirit, if not the execution. I agree that what is proposed in that legislation is deeply flawed, but the intent, to protect IP from theft is a good one.

Well said. Unfortunately, the lot who are busy beating the broken drum of scarcity are making it difficult for the rest of us who are honestly interested in fair laws around IP.

Should IP be protected? Absolutely. I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment. If we don't protect it and pay the people who created it (and yes, when necessary, distributed it), then we'll not have it anymore. To do that, the laws have to, and had to, change. And those laws must be enforced.

Piracy is out of hand today. As 'geeks', we've provided the public with the ability to break IP protection laws with impunity. It's not acceptable to the creators of such content, and it is not sustainable.

Now, that said, I'm fine with why it happened. It happened because of improved technology, and to be sure there are companies that reject the model on that basis alone. While I want to see legislation that will protect content owners, I would hate to see them protect and prop up those who fail to adopt their business models to match the new technology. But as long as people focus on something as stupid as the "scarcity" defense, we're not going to convince the lawmakers, content owners, or even the general public that a fair version of these laws would do good. They will see us as thieves, looking to use a loophole to rationalize our theft.

“We have now moved into an era where the consumer is in control, and where thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, you cannot control access any more,”

And thank God for that. What country does this guy think he lives in? I'd expect that in communist China but in Canada? Ouch.

I suppose it's just one more example of a government being unhappy about losing control of the minds of its people. In all honesty, if Canadian content can't compete with American then it deserves to lose.

Sorry friend, you have it backwards.

The role of IT is to provide ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS. When we start providing a one-off scratch for every itch that a corner office user gets, we make a mess of the whole thing and we actually hinder the business.

It constantly amuses me to hear people talk about IT as a road block. Most IT people are solution oriented. The last thing they want to be is a roadblock. They want to find solutions to problems, but through hard experience we've learned that we have to approach it systematically and with planning. When people think IT is roadblocking because of this philosophy, to help them understand, I usually compare it to how the mail works.

Can you imagine, if on any given street, each person could choose how he receives mail? Say 30% favour a local group of mailboxes, 60% prefer delivery to the house, the remaining 10% would like to pick up at the local post office. Each method is a valid solution, and may actually be the best solution for each person, but the logistics of it would be a nightmare and the cost would be three times what it would be by just picking one of those solutions and rolling it out for everyone.

Just because a device has a legitimate purpose, it doesn't mean that you need to make it happen. It means you consider it when developing your enterprise solution, but that's it.

No one disagrees that IT's job is to support people. And sometimes that does make our job harder, but anywhere there are large numbers of people who rely upon a service, be that mail, road/air traffic, legal, financial, or whatever, there are established ways of doing things that benefit the majority. The second we start making exceptions for every malcontent with a complaint, we lose what makes the system work for everyone else.

I have mixed feelings about this Bill. On one hand, parts of the Bill seem very reasonable. For example, reducing the maximum penalty for infringement and going after the enablers both seem like sensible approaches. Extensions to education for fair dealing also seems reasonable. The less reasonable parts obviously include not being able to make a video library from what you record from TV, and not being able to bypass digital locks for media transfers. On its face, those parts of the Bill seem ludicrous and clearly influenced by US policies and lobbyists. Deeper down, I suspect the former is rooted in how copyright law works (you must aggressively pursue all forms / violators of piracy or you may lose your ability to protect the work in the future), and the latter allows the government to prosecute people directly for breaking digital locks rather than messing about in copyright law. Looking strictly at the law, not allowing permanent TV recordings is completely unenforceable by the police (though easily enforceable through technology). The section about not breaking digital locks will make it a challenge for Canadians to acquire the software to convert our CD's and DVD's to digital storage, but for determined users, not impossible. I suspect this too will be nearly impossible to enforce in that arena. Where it will be easy to enforce is torrenting, which obviously bypasses digital locks on material and thus qualifies under that section as prohibited. The government is in an odd position. They are not accustomed to enforcing copyright law -- at least not in a non-commercial sense. Large scale piracy for profit, yes, individual for home use, no. Now they are being asked to. And for good reason - piracy is easy and pretty much everyone who knows how to do it, *is* doing it. Some more than others, but it's happening a lot. It's gone past the point where civil law can handle it -- it's time for it to become criminal. But how? They definitely don't want to be involved in individual criminal copyright cases. Too much ambiguity and complexity. So instead, digital locks. Nice and simple. We don't care about the material, we only care about the lock you bypassed by downloading (and made available while doing so) a torrented copy. You'll not have an easy time defending that. Makes sense in a twisted kind of way. That said, I agree with Geist when he says that the digital lock portion of the Bill will have the unfortunate side effect of making legitimate use of ripping music/movies nearly impossible for the average Canadian. It will be very much like winding the clock back 10 years to a point where only the computer geeks had the tools to rip their own music/movies. I'm not sure what the alternative is though. Of course, the interesting bit continues to be gathering proof that a person is downloading materials they don't have a right to. I'm curious to see how that process will work and what Canadian judges will accept as evidence.