BSA spams Canadians on p2p
p2pnet.net news:- America’s Business Software Alliance is spamming Canadians, “to get the message out that peer-to-peer file sharing is illegal,” says the CBC.
P2p file swapping is not in and of itself illegal, of course, although uploading and sharing copyrighted items is.
“Thousands of the e-mails are being sent to Canadian users each month under a program known as ‘notice and notice’,” says the story. “Major Canadian internet service providers including Rogers, Bell and Telus have voluntarily agreed to distribute the notices to their customers on behalf of the industry associations. Telus forwards an average of 4,000 notices every month.”
The entertainment cartels have, “long expressed frustration with Canada, and its unwillingness to modernize copyright laws,” says the story.
For “modernize” read re-write them to suit the cartels.
“Canada’s copyright laws regarding uploading and downloading are unclear, and that does present a number of challenges in curbing internet piracy,”BSABusiness Software Alliance saying
It emailed some 60,000 “notice and notice” emails to Canadians in 2006 and it’s been, “most effective,” its Neil MacBride is quoted as saying.
Rogers and Telus say they don’t pass any personal information to any of the groups initiating the notice emails, says the story, adding:
” ‘Notice and notice’ differs from the ‘notice and take-down’ program that’s in place in the United States. There, when an industry group notices an alleged copyright violation, an e-mail similar to the ones being sent to Canadian users is forwarded to the American ISP. In most cases, the ISPs are forced to immediately take down the content or face penalties.”
The emails don’t have “significant legal weight in the sense that it doesn’t mean they’re facing a lawsuit immediately or even the claims of infringement have been proven,” the CBC has Net law expert Dr Michael Geist saying.
But, “I think they’ve proven surprisingly effective and in fact indications are that when subscribers receive these, a significant proportion will take down the offending content if, in fact, it is infringing,” he says.
The story doesn’t say how many Canadians who have nothing to do with p2p file sharing are also getting the notices.
Also See:
BBC – Music execs criticise DRM systems, February 15, 2006
corporate narks – RIAA ‘extortion’ letter to ISPs, February 13, 2006
sums it up – ‘ISPs don’t work for the RIAA’, February 14, 2006
Want to subscribe to p2pnet by email with Feedburner? Just click here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use our own p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
