The Music Pirate Police Are Now Mounted!

Copyright Reforms are being tabled in Canada this week. The party could well be over for people who download pirated media in this country. According to the CTV, the legislation would provide a “notice-and notice” system to advise ISPs and then subscribers of alleged copyright infringements.

Who will be sending these notices? Why, the RIAA and the CRIA, of course, along with any other large, corporate copyright owner capable of actually flexing legal muscles strong enough to invoke the act.

Described as, “the first of several” copyright reforms to be tabled by the government, Graham Henderson of the Canadian Recording Industry Association feels it doesn’t go far enough:

“Not only is it not as tough as we would like. It doesn’t provide the adequate legal framework that we would like,” Graham Henderson, of the Canadian Recording Industry Association told CTV News.

The proposed law will also provide DMCA-like copyright restrictions on digital media, preventing users from bypassing technologies that prevent them from making copies. But these “devices” already impose restrictions that violate the terms of fair-use creating a paradoxical, legal loop. According to fair use, a buyer is allowed to make a copy of a CD for archival or use in the car personal use. Those same terms allow a user to copy a CD to iTunes for deployment on an iPod. If that CD comes with copyright mechanisms that make it difficult or impossible to copy it, then circumventing those technologies would be an illegal activity, in spite of a user’s rights to make a copy…

Confused? You bet. It’s great that the copyright holders have enough legal clout to impose governments to create laws to further prop up their own failed attempts at securing their media with technical devices. q.v.,, DVD-jon, who I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Apple restricting their OS to their own hardware via technical means.

Now, most of this has to do with online file-trading. While the recording industries have long battled attempts to reproduce music by attempting to place levies on recordable media from tape to hard-drives, file-sharing is the real bee in their bonnet. It’s a great example of the industry missing an application for a new technology because they were too pig-headed to understand its potential.

I remember as far back as 1996 experiencing a new phenomenon for the first time and being turned into an instant fan of South Park for their animated short “The Spirit of Christmas”. As an experiment in viral marketing it worked brilliantly and South Park has since had a successful run of 9 years on television as well as popularizing its creators and giving them the opportunity to make feature-length films. The show “Battlestar Galactica” has been extremely well-received, after being delayed in North America and released first in the UK, only to be heavily passed-around on the bit-torrent networks. (Its success is largely-considered to be because of word-of-mouth advertising by file-sharers) Fiona Apple, who’s moody piano stylings and gruff voice were passed over for release by her label, Sony Records for allegedly being a bit too vocal about the shady, dealings of the megacorporation. Officially, it’s because the album isn’t “radio-friendly” enough, but that hasn’t stopped people from sharing the album enthusiastically, with one New York radio station frequently playing it in-full. Wilco, who’s brilliant album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was denied release for similar reasons became a huge hit online and subsequently released on a label…

And on and on these stories go, and yet the media companies continue to fight it. A growing number of people are clamouring for Apple to add video streaming / downloads to iTunes and I think this makes a lot of sense. Charge a buck or two for a tv-show and you’d have millions of people downloading them. Compare that to the 30 million people who watched the season-finale of CSI and it starts to look like a pretty compelling source of revenue.

Lastly, Michael Geist, a professor at Ottawa University has some excellent commentary on the state of affairs and well-worth reading.

ps, thanks to boondoggler for the title suggestion.