‘I broke copyright law!’ – Tony Clement
p2pnet view Politics | Music | P2P:- Industry minister Tony Clement admits he built his impressive music library “in part by breaking Canada’s copyright law”.
Along with heritage minister James Moore, he’s “poised to introduce new copyright legislation within days”, says the National Post.
But “until the law is updated to permit Canadians to transfer music onto MP3 players from CDs they have purchased, Mr. Clement stands on the wrong side of Canada’s copyright law”, he says.
What !? Canadians can’t legally move music from CDs they’ve bought and paid for to their music players?
Surely that’s not the case ?!
But it is.
“The legislation is expected to make expressly legal a few basic things that consumers do everyday”, says the story.
“This includes lifting the restriction on ripping music from a legally purchased CD to transfer to an MP3 player and permitting ‘time shifting’ of television programs through widely used personal video recorders — if there are no digital locks to get around.”
But, “the fact of the matter is I have compact discs that I’ve transferred, I have compact discs from my children or my wife that I’ve transferred”, says Clement with disarming frankness.
“None of that is allowable under the current regime,” the story has Clement, a “music buff” with a digital database “that now stands at 10,452 songs” declaring.
He goes on >>>
It shows that the current regime is not realistic and is not modern to encompass how people obtain their entertainment in today’s world.
That’s what happens in a family. You do tend to share music that way and I think most people would find that to be perfectly acceptable behaviour. But our current law is so antiquated, it doesn’t contemplate that situation.
But, continues the National Post, “in with the possibility of an overarching emphasis on digital locks or technological protection measures to limit the transferring or sharing of content, a person could still run afoul of the law for simple things like breaking the code of a DVD shipped from a friend overseas so he can watch the video on his machine.
“A documentary filmmaker, artist, student or reporter who gets around a digital lock to use a video or audio clip for a montage could also get in trouble, because digital locks trump all fair dealing provisions in copyright legislation. Fair use allows people to make use of copyrighted works without requiring permission in certain circumstances.”
However, the issue of digital locks supersede everything else, says NDP digital affairs critic Charlie Angus in the story, stating:
“You can provide any other kind of copyright protection guarantees for us to back up, and for research or study, but if there’s a digital lock on it, then you get treated the same as an international bootlegger counterfeiter. That’s just simply not a reasonable policy to foster innovation or to foster respect for copyright.
“What they’re giving is all the power to the corporate distributor and none of the power to the consumer and none of that money is going to the creator. That’s the problem with the Conservative approach to copyright.” .
Moore, meanwhile, “admitted to reporters last year he, too, ran afoul of the copyright law as an early adopter of the PVR” but a spokesman said Moore “was not immediately available to clarify” if any of the songs “put him offside of the law”.
(Cheers, everyone who told me about this 
)
National Post – Industry minister admits to breaking copyright law to build iPod collection, May 26, 2010
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May 27th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
More “bait ‘n’ switch” from the usual suspects.
They can throw in all the “new” consumer rights your heart desires, but as long as the sanctity of the digital lock trumps all those rights, they’ve given consumers nothing.
May 27th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
“They can throw in all the “new” consumer rights your heart desires, but as long as the sanctity of the digital lock trumps all those rights, they’ve given consumers nothing.”
Actually, they’ve done worse than that: they’ve actively penalized anybody *stupid enough* to jump through their hoops in the (misbegotten) interests of remaining “law abiding”. (“Bad law” does that, Y’know.)
Hell, they’ve ensured that the “cracked” version is infinitely *superior* to the “authorized” version.