Thursday, June 12, 2008

Great job on that Copyright legislation Jim... NOT!

It's a sad day for Canadian consumers, artists and entrepreneurs. Cory Doctorow puts it best:

Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his answer to the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act today as planned, and it's even worse than the US DMCA. The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny, narrow, useless exception for security research.

Here's the summary from Michael Geist, Canadian IP specialist.

If Canadians and parties in opposition of the minority Conservative government needed a reason to vote their asses out of power - this is it folks.

Message to Mr. Prentice: After all that denial that your impending legislation wasn't as bad as we made it out to be, one would have thought that maybe you would create something in the interests of ordinary people. Nope. I hope the masses mobilize against this law and I look forward to seeing the government become aware of what Canadians really want.

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