p2pnet.net News:- “Liza Frulla could barely contain herself,” says the intro to a Toronto Star story.

Canadian heritage minister Frulla had given her chief of staff, John Welch, “a leave of absence to defend himself from allegations at the Gomery Commission yesterday”.

The Gomery Commission is examining the huge financial scandal which continues to rock Canada’s Liberal government and which looks likely to unseat it, forcing a snap election, possibly within weeks.

Frulla, meanwhile, is in complete lock-step with the entertainment industry cartels which are attempting to have Canada’s copyright laws re-written to better suit their commercial interests.

“I am in a rage! A rage!” she’s quoted as saying. “If people have lined their pockets, used their contacts to enrich themselves and stain the name `Liberal’ — that’s tough to take.”

The minister-for-the-moment wants to follow the path laid out by her predecessor, Hélène Chalifour Scherrer, who promised to re-organize Canada’s copyright act to enable the music cartels to sue Canadians for sharing music online in the same way that they sue Americans.

“Frulla expressed her intention to toughen Canada’s ‘antiquated’ intellectual property laws through proposed new copyright legislation to be tabled in June,” she’s widely quoted as saying.

The cartels claim they’re being “devastated” by file sharing.

However, it’s never been established that file sharing has resulted in the loss of even a single sale, and in the meanwhile, the numbers of people who share with each other online continue to soar.

Behind the blustering and blundering of EMI, Sony BMG, Warner and UMG is the reality that, Canute-like, they’re desperately trying to hold back the tide, refusing to accept the fact they’re now in the digital 21st century rather than the physical 1990s.

(Thanks, TT)

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See:-
Toronto Star - Whole political class is undermined, April 22, 2005
complete lock-step - Frulla backs Big Music, p2pnet, April 5, 2005

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