Big 4 labels hijack 2nd copyright town hall
p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- Last night saw the George W. Harper government’s second copyright town hall in Toronto.
But it was, “so over-the-top that their message was lost in light of such an obvious orchestrated attempt to stack the deck,” blogs Ottawa law professor Michael Geist.
“This was not a real townhall that brought together differing views, but rather an all-out effort by the industry to scoop up the available seats, guarantee themselves a dominant voice, and exclude many alternative voices in the process,” he says.
It didn’t bring the community together, “to talk copyright in an open and balanced manner,” he goes on »»»
Instead, the music industry stacked the room to such a degree that little else was discussed. There was the odd intervention from ACTRA, the Writers Guild, the education community, and software developers (and a self-professed pirate who may have worn a fair copyright shirt but did not discuss anything that resembled fair copyright), but the repeated music industry representation was the dominant theme of the night (you can see for yourself here).
With a little more than two weeks left in the consultation, “there should be no doubt that the lobby groups will be engaging in a major effort to push for their DMCA-style reforms,” says Geist, adding:
“The calls for three-strikes and you’re out, notice and takedown, DMCA anti-circumvention legislation, and no flexible fair dealing will only get louder. Now is the time for Canadians – many of whom could not get a seat at the townhall since it was filled by industry reps just days after the consultation launch – to speak out.
“Don’t wait – send in your comments today and encourage others to do the same.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Michael Geist – The Toronto Music Industry Town Hall, August 27, 2009
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August 28th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Then we need to flood the remaining townhalls, insane numbers of concerned citizens, and see if we can intimidate the copyright supporters to keep their empty rhetoric to themselves!
August 28th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Probably not going to happen. See, the shills show up because they are paid to be there. You are not going to intimidate those guys, the RIAA will either just pay the same ones more, or hire a more thuggish group that doesn’t intimidate. Also, to Joe Citizen, copyright sounds like a dry legal debate, it isn’t like health care where he can see off the bat how it can affect him if things change. Maybe in Sweden you could get a large crew to show up to counter the pro copyright crowd, but I just don’t see that happening in either the U.S. or Canada.
August 29th, 2009 at 4:31 am
The bottom-line of this article was donât wait-send in your comments today (basically before itâs too late). But I already wrote to the CRTC before they even decided in Bell Canadaâs favour that throttling was OK! This meeting (the copyright town hall one) proves that the entertainment industry and big corporations will out last and out manoeuvre the consumers!
Big business continually tries to enforce and change the laws just to protect their pocketbook! It was the same entertainment industry that got American politicians to change the law so that U.S. customs agents could legally force Americans and all visitors to open the contents of their laptop computers. This wasnât done for the sake of security of the U.S. homeland; itâs to see if anyone has any illegal songs or movies on their hard drives!
Itâs corporate lawyers that wrote free trade agreements and they just got the politicians to pass their legal drafts into law! Big business wrote free trade to favour themselves but free trade isnât what itâs happening. Itâs supposed to mean the trading of products between nations without duty or other tariffs applied. Free trade in true economic terms means to trade back and forth between nations on products that have been grown or built in one nation and shipping these products free of tariffs to other countries that generally donât grow (that product or enough of it for the population) and/or donât manufacture these products.
What free trade has become is a farce, an immoral outrageous and absolutely disgusting one at that! Free trade has just become a way for industrialized nations to allow corporations to move production centres and assembly plants to third world nations and then just re-import these products back to the industrialized nations free of tariffs! And but this is the big AND this kind of re-importation can only favour the corporations! Because when Americans wanted cheaper drugs, many people and even state governments bought drugs from Canada and how did the big pharmaceutical companies reply? With cries of it being unfair and when that didnât work they tried scare tactics saying that Americans donât know what theyâre getting in terms of quality (it maybe fake). But many of these drugs are made from these vary own same brand name pharmaceutical plants; the only difference was the cost! And when those scare tactics didnât work, some of these same brand name pharmaceutical companies began to threaten the Canadian government that they would stop selling drugs to them if the Canadian government (federal & provincial) didnât stop the flow of drugs destined for the Canadian domestic market that were being resold to Americans (at a cheaper price than Americans could get).
So for me the bottom-line isnât to write to any more politicians or governing bodies (such as the CRTC) but the answer is to legislate new laws to further prevent the illegal and immoral interference of big business to change domestic and global laws in order to justify their profit margins! Iâm not against capitalism and true economic free trade; Iâm just against the bastardization of the marketplace by big business displacing peoplesâ rights and destroying the environment all for the sake of profit maximization!
So screw this letter writing crap regarding just this corporate hijacking of the Internet, let’s make it illegal for big business to manipulate our freedomsâperiod! Itâs enoughâyou want a 3 strikes law then letâs start with the corporations first! How many violations are they currently breaking right now? Letâs examine their booksâis their any tax evasion going on? Are they suppressing the real figures of their sales and paying less residual payments to their artists? Do you really want me to pursue a strike three on you big business?
Seeâturn the screws and the spotlight back on big business before we as a society allow them to dictate to us how we can live!