p2pnet.net news view:- According to the entertainment cartels, Canada is the favourite port of call for copyright pirates. But neither Globe and Mail columnist Jack Kapica nor Digital Copyright Canada’s Russell McOrmond would agree with this assessment>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Property and piracy
By Jack Kapica – the Globe and Mail

Clearly, intellectual property rights must be better protected in Canada. Today, the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network released a report called A Road Map for Change, which is described as “most comprehensive and detailed study of Canada’s counterfeiting problem published to date.”

The CACN report condemns the “unchecked counterfeiting and piracy” here, with our “weak intellectual property protection and enforcement [that is] contributing to the explosive growth of piracy in Canada.”

The report is being presented to Cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and policy makers in Ottawa. In other words, it’s a lobby effort to get Ottawa to upgrade our intellectual property laws, especially the Copyright Act, which has been the target of the Business Software Alliance, the Canadian Recording Industry Association, the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft and now the CACN.

Taken at face value, reports like the CACN’s paint a dreadful picture of piracy. But reading the report the day after Microsoft announced that free and open-source software violates 235 of its patents makes me uncomfortable.

The list of violations was made by Microsoft’s legal department, and since the allegations have not been tested in court or even reviewed by the U.S. Patent Office, they remain lawyers’ claims and nothing more.

Nevertheless, it has been alleged that in fighting global piracy, Microsoft counts patent violations as piracy, along with such villainous activity as bootleg software CDs and sharing software disks among co-workers. In other words, you’re a software pirate if you run just about any version of the Linux operating system.

Canadian open-source software advocate Russell McOrmond has been saying for years that software companies bundle their complaints this way. McOrmond (who co-ordinates a website called Digital Copyright Canada and writes a blog there), told me in an e-mail exchange some time ago that the big software makers’ “largest competitors (as stated by the most successful software manufacturer, Microsoft, in their SEC filings) come from Free/Libre and Open Source, which is a competitor to software manufacturing. Their self-called ‘piracy studies’ use methodologies which include these competitors as ‘theft’.”

In 2002, McOrmond studied the BSA’s report on piracy, and found it “compares the number of PCs shipped for home or office use, both as new units and replacements, and assumes that people would be buying the same amount of software as in previous years.” You don’t have to have a degree in statistics to see the problem with that formula.

The effect of tactics such as these taint claims of righteousness. It would help a lot if the process of persuading us about the necessity of adopting tougher laws were more transparent.

Slashdot it!

If your Net access is blocked by goverment restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze 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.

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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 7:30 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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