New Canadian Copyright Bill Introduced
Yawn. Copyright law. Could there by anything more boring?
Well, snap out of it. The feds have been trying to update the Copyright Act for the better part of a decade now, but every time they come close, there’s been an election and it dies on the order paper.
We all need to pay attention to copyright law because it affects what we can do with music. For example, under the old law, it’s technically illegal to rip a CD to MP3 in Canada. The new Copyright Modernization Act will fix that. Oh, joy. (As if any of us was paying that part of the old act any attention…)
But there are also a lot in the new act that should give us pause, including the bit about digital locks.
Please read this. It affects you more than you realize.
Consider this true and mundane story.
My 3 year old daughter receives a DVD of "The Wiggles" from her cousin in Australia. Unfortunately it's coded for the Australian region codes. So I use a program to convert it for her and she loves it. So much so that I use the same program to copy it onto my iPhone (circumventing CSS protection) so she can watch it on journeys.
The thing about that is, under the new copyright law, I've committed 2 criminal acts, even though I legally owned that DVD. Fair Use should let us copy media we legally own for our own private use, regardless of if we break a digital lock while we do it.
Sorry Alan.
The day the Cons got their majority government was the day this issue died. They're going to push this through no matter what WE as consumers say, because big business has had THEIR say, and we all know who wins out in that party.
When purchasing a CD, DVD, software, etc. you don't own it; you are only paying for a licence to use it.