---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 13:47:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Michael Hart
Liza Frulla also lost her seat last night. She was the Heritage minister which made her co-responsible for copyright (along with Industry Canada). She had replaced Helene Scherrer who lost her seat last June.
Is there a copyright curse!?!?!?
It would certainly seem so!!! Just look what happened in Australia just a few years ago. The Parliament said they would not even consider extending copyrights, but only three years later, after a long siege of economic warfare, a new copyright extension was passed, and I think this prevents any copyrights from expiring for an additional 20 years.
I would like to know what direction the government will take in deciding whether schools have to pay a royalty to access the Internet. This was dropped from a contentious copyright revision last year, but it will likely resurface. The revision died regardless when the election was called, because it had not been voted on by Parliament.
It seems as if the corporate world has declared World War III on copyright through its power via the United Nations. For those who were not aware, the World Intellectual Property Organization [WIPO] is now the official arm of the United Nations on copyright issues, even though it originated as a cartel of the largest publishing companies.
There are quite a few loopholes in Canadian copyright. In Canada, we are required to pay a fee, a levy or a royalty to use commercially prepared materials in the classroom. We can buy public performance rights for a video, or we can pay a fee for taping a program off the air, but we can't show packaged TV shows because there is no law for making restitution to the copyright holder. An example would be if an instructor wanted to show a boxed set of "Friends" on DVD. (Don't ask why; just accept that they do.) When we phone American distributors to negotiate the rights for this, they a) don't understand the concept of having to pay to show something in the classroom, and b) they often don't want to set up a process for this, since we're such a small market.
If you think this is bad, you should visit locales where there ARE no legal copies for sale, but copying is still actively forbidden. In these cases the inhabitants are forced to either remain ignorant or to break the law to get a copy of something the rest of the world takes for granted as being easily available. With all the mega-mergers that have been going on since the new world of Reaganomics began in the 1980's, blockbusters sales are all there is and small markets are not going to be served. They SAY it is the "trickle down" theory of economics, but then they do all they can to PREVENT the products from actually trickling down. I've been in markets in both Europe and Asia where you couldn't find a legal copy of nearly anything to buy, simply because the markets weren't large enough.
I wonder what small niche there would be for a book-oriented entrepreneur who could exploit the absence of a service in Canada. We sometimes hear of a semi-secret Free-Trade tribunal which pays off Americans who want to copy an American practice in Canada, but can't because of local restrictions. If "culture" is brought into the Free Trade agreement by the new Conservative government, there could be some easy money to be made! Maybe we should make Jack Valenti the new Heritage minister and just give up. He was constantly railing against the restrictions that limited American product to 95% of the market.
Yes, you've hit it squarely on the head. Microsoft used to complain that so many copies of Windows were pirated in the locales I mentioned above, yet how hard did they try to sell to that very same market? The same was true for books, records, etc., though apparently Playboy can be bought nearly everywhere.
Stephen Davies Calgary
Michael