Canada Remains a 'Safe Haven' For Online Piracy, Rightsholders Claim (torrentfreak.com) 134
The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups are calling out Canada, claiming that it remains a "safe haven" for copyright infringers and pirate sites, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: One of the main criticisms is that, despite having been called out repeatedly in the past, the country still offers a home to many pirate sites. "For a number of years, extending well into the current decade, Canada had a well-deserved reputation as a safe haven for some of the most massive and flagrant Internet sites dedicated to the online theft of copyright material," IIPA writes. Another disturbing development, according to IIPA, is the emergence of stand-alone BitTorrent applications that allow users to stream content directly through an attractive and user-friendly interface, hinting at Popcorn Time. In addition to the traditional pirate sites that remain in Canada, IIPA reports that several websites offering modified game console gear have also moved there in an attempt to escape liability under U.S. law.
If the *.AA think it's bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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But how is the poor, poor metallica going to survive then? I mean god, they have to do concerts now! Won't someone please think of the poor metallica!
Re:If the *.AA think it's bad (Score:4, Informative)
But how is the poor, poor metallica going to survive then? I mean god, they have to do concerts now! Won't someone please think of the poor metallica!
Hey Anonymous Coward, my brother is an author.
When someone steals an e-book of his work, how does he put bread on the table?
Should he "do" book-reading concerts?
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Not completely related, but to answer your question... why not just publish paper-only stuff? Lots of self-publishing resources out there. For example, CreateSpace [createspace.com] can publish his books on paper and sell it for him on Amazon for a nominal fee per copy, and for an additional fee, pimp his book to bookstores.
I guess what I'm getting at is, your bother is limiting himself if he only does eBooks.
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why not just publish paper-only stuff?
Limits your market. Lots of people don't want to buy a paper book - They want an e-version for their e-reader.
Plus it's a 'greener' choice - No dead trees.
But he doesn't exclusively do e-books.
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It is not that simple; an ebook requires a device that consumes power every time you read it. Some devices consume more power than others.
I am all for having more trees, but you cannot have an infinite amount of them. As long as a new tree replaces the 'dead' one, carbon is taken out of the atmosphere. Paper is a form of fixated carbon. Although energy is required to get it to its final format, so does a tablet.
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Plus it's a 'greener' choice - No dead trees.
It's not greener. We have a forestry cycle for a reason, and in the west every tree cut down for pulp, wood, fuel is replaced with 2 new trees and the lovely cycle begins anew.
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One popular source for such ebooks is Project Gutenberg.
But there is one drawback of relying on these old books: You'll build up internalized biases based on what people thought prior to 1923. This is because of three-generation copyright.
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But there is one drawback of relying on these old books: You'll build up knowledge of non-politically-correct historical facts that weren't memory-holed prior to 1923.
FTFY
Strat
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Create a Patreon, that works for indie comic book authors.
That said, The problem in Canada , and what the MPAA are referring to are people selling nVidia Shield, and other Android tv boxes (eg Ouya) pre-loaded with Kodi and all the piracy plugins.
What people are oblivious about is that these are very poor replacements for Netflix, and even worse replacements for blueray discs. Even the one person in my family who pirates movies and tv shows frequently bought one and then gave it away, finding downloading to
Re: If the *.AA think it's bad (Score:3)
Serious question:
Did he really believe he would be able to write stuff that people will /want/, and make a living at it?
That's the problem with creating anything. People have to want to buy it. Whether it be books, movies, tv shows, beer or basically anything else.
Personally I'm pretty picky about what I spend my money on. I pay for Netflix because it's convenient. I buy the odd movie here and there if I like it. Maybe twice a year if there is something really good in the theatre's I will take my wife or my
Bundle sites (Score:1)
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Honest question - how does he (and you I suppose by extension) feel about Libraries. They effectively cause the same issue for authors at a smaller scale (although maybe larger in aggregate, (not having firm numbers on ebook piracy rates vs traditional library use), especially since some libraries (my local included) offer ebook borrowing services.
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The other question is "how does the *AA feel about libraries". My wife borrows a dozen or so DVDs every week or so, which doesn't seem much different then piracy. Library buys one copy and it gets shared, heavily in the case of new releases. I have the feeling that libraries wouldn't exist if the *AA had their way and we're lucky that they didn't have any power a hundred years ago.
Publishers and the parent posters brother probably hate me for borrowing books as well.
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my brother is an author.
When someone steals an e-book of his work, how does he put bread on the table?
Should he "do" book-reading concerts?
Most pirates purchase more than non-pirates [huffingtonpost.com]. What your brother should do is provide enough value in his work to make the people who pirate one book want to seek out the rest.
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Yes. They are called book signings and book tours.
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First, when you infringe on copyright by electronic distribution nobody is claiming that any electrons are being stolen.... what is actually being stolen is a commensurate portion of the copyrighter's exclusive right to control who is allowed to copy the work... if someone is copying the work without permission, they are effectively permanently usurping that control from the copyright holder (since the copyright holder never actually regains any of the control over copying that was lost by unauthorized cop
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Infringing on copyright is theft.
No, it's copyright infringement as spelled out in the law.
I view modern copyright infringement as a form of political protest against absurdly-long copyright terms bought and paid for by greedy and amoral media distributors from criminally-corrupt politicians. They jumped the shark in most people's eyes so now many, many people view all copyright as something to be ignored and the copyright owners/distributors have only themselves to blame for any losses they suffer.
It may be 'law' but it is a law enacted t
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Re:If the *.AA think it's bad (Score:5, Insightful)
...the only real reason that people object to calling copyright infringement "theft" is because they don't want to feel guilty about doing it,...
Or maybe, I dunno, because it's clearly defined as two separate things under the law.
I understand copyright infringement is against the law, but "the law is an ass" in this case as the law is the product of corruption and criminality. I did not feel this way before the endless extensions and honored copyright law. Now, not so much. If copyright was reset back to the original terms I would once again take it seriously.
The world has changed and copyright must change with it, or die. As it stands, copyright law is locking away our own culture by preventing works from entering the public domain, which is the reason why copyright law was originally written, not to assure someone and their relatives money in near-perpetuity for a single creative work. That was simply a carrot to encourage creators to share their works. You have no inherent right otherwise to profit from or control any creative work once it's been published.
Strat
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Theft - the unlawful deprivation from the rightful owner of some of their lawfully recognized property.
Copyright infringement - the unlawful deprivation from the rightful owner of some measure of exclusivity of control over who may copy a work. This exclusivity is supposed to be part of copyright, and so is rightfully the property of the copyright holder. You can hardly say that the copyright holder has just as much exclusivity of control over who may copy a work if somebody copies the work without aut
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...exclusivity of control
Does NOT equal:
lawfully recognized property.
You use contradicting definitions describing two entirely different things in your own post and then try to conflate them as the same thing.
Maybe you should rethink your position and/or critical-thinking skills.
Just saying.
Strat
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...exclusivity of control was the property of the copyright holder.
You seem to be conflating two different definitions of "property". In the first definition, "property" is a physical thing, as in land or a car. The second, and the definition which applies to "exclusivity of control", is that of a characteristic, as in occupying space is a "property" of mass.
"Exclusivity of control" is a "property" of copyright law, as in an attribute, it is not physical property as in a car or land is "property".
These are important distinctions to grasp in order to have a meaningful disc
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Re:If the *.AA think it's bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Well technically speaking that copyright was illegally provided as the works in question were never tested according to law to ensure those works do promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. No test, by law, no copyright. Now that question still hasn't been answered. Why do patents adhere to law by being tested and why does copyright not adhere to law, is never tested and is protected a great public expense.
If the work does not promote the progress of science or the 'Useful' arts, it should not be copyrightable.
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Religious protection (Score:1)
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It's probably a net good for the world. The sooner these leeches are cut off, the better for literally everyone involved in the equation other than themselves.
We're accepting your illegal immigrants to go with the illegal whatever that the RIAA and MPAA dream up.
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Canadians chose to write their laws in a way that favors consumers over major content distributors.
Canadians are OK with this.
Screw off, big media. Eat a puck.
Re: Good (Score:1)
Sweden did that too, until they had to change. RIAA/MPAA have very deep pockets and very good connections, you know. They can force entire countries to change their laws. Do not think Canada is safe. Don't be surprised when they yield too.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
The main reason we get away with a lot of piracy is that we introduced the blank media tax in 1997. At the time that meant that almost any storage media that could possibly used to store MP3s/Video had some charge placed on it that was paid to the various rights holders. Essentially the various interested parties surrendered some of their ability to go after violators so that they could get a steady paycheck. It wasn't like Canada was some piracy utopia, they just found an alternative method to get paid and were happy to settle for that.
Cut to today where most people don't even use the taxable media anymore and those paychecks are getting smaller and smaller. The rights holders have fought for years to extend the tax to other devices (like MP3 players and smartphones) and have sometimes won but usually lost or been overturned so now they're just going to make noise. They've been talking about trying to remove the tax so that they can go after individuals much like in the US.
remove the tax and what happens to people who (Score:2)
remove the tax and what happens to people who payed it and used the law to copy stuff can they be sued? can they use the old law to get a free pass? Do they have to fight it out in court and still lose after the costs of court?
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The law never technically gave anyone legal protection, just made it a dangerous process for the rights holders to try and sue because most people didn't like the idea of record companies 'double dipping' (receive their portion of the tax and then suing for damages). Even so, if they tried to sue after the tax was removed for a violation that occurred while the tax existed my guess would be most judges would possibly find for the plaintiff (as piracy is a violation of copyright law) but the reward would be
Go Canada! (Score:3, Insightful)
So the poor snowflakes over at the MaPhiAA are tired of "calling out" Canada for not bending over to ensure its profits.
Well, BOO-FUCKING-HOO!
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No need to be that inventive with the name:
Music And Film Industry Association.
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Holy crap. They have NO Trump in Canada AND free health coverage AND piracy rights are better which makes the MPAA pissed? How soon can I move there???
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These are not the words of a Canadian. /s
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Yeah, there was no sorry in there, so obviously isn't Canadian.
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That's better than free, since it sounds less magic and more plausible.
Sounds like people living in poverty sure have it easy though.
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While people living in poverty have it easier then the States, there's still a certain amount of prejudice in the system. Poor people are less likely to have a family doctor, so reduced to hanging out at clinics to be seen by a Doctor who is likely to treat them worse as they're poor. Pharmaceuticals, while cheap by American standards, are expensive by first world standards and not likely to be covered by pharmacare etc unless person is disabled. The government doesn't cover things like dentists, optometris
MPAA, RIAA ar hosers, eh (Score:2)
Or the MPAAA & RIAAA as they're called north of the border.
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Finally! (Score:1)
Calling out Canada on their terrorist like activities. I mean ultimately this piracy is funding ISIS and Russian hackers.
I think we all know what this means.
It's time to invade Canada!
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It's been awhile since we burnt down any white houses, so, why not? Nothing better to do while we wait for spring. ;)
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Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words they have perfectly sensible piracy laws that don't roll through peoples lives like like a WWII sea mine for copying a few songs/movies. These agencies lost the right to make these kinds of claims when they began hitting people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and jail terms for making duplicates of their crap and calling it "theft" of "intellectual property", while at the same time demanding that they not be held accountable when in their steamrolling operations they hit droves of innocent people with copyright claims/take-down notices.
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Let's see what kind of content do I watch?
- Japanese Anime
- Korean Drama's
- Brazilian Telenovela
- Italian Cartoons
- French Cartoons
- English Cartoons
- English (BBC) news
- Canadian news
- Canadian cartoons (also run in the US)
Now to be fair, European content rarely makes it here intact, but when it does (Miraculous Ladybug is a French/Korean production) it's only sheer luck, and usually after it's been pirated for 2-3 years anyway. The Anime production companies have learned this already and thus partner with
Antitrustworthy (Score:2)
All the TV networks should work together and agree that if two or more TV shows or films sound similar, just push off release/production of one of them.
Wouldn't collusion to avoid dueling movies [allthetropes.org] smack of restraint of trade?
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
We're all taxed on digital media (found guilty and sentenced regardless of whether we've actually committed an offense) so Canadian citizens tend to be a bit more blasé about benefiting from digital piracy. To us, it's not really piracy because we've paid. Maybe the **AA guys should have thought about that before lobbying successfully for the laws we ended up with.
After that, we have laws that say sharing unlicensed content is on the head of the person doing the sharing... and you actually have to prove the infringement.
So yeah, it's more difficult to stamp out pirate sites here because we expect due process and not **AA thugs wearing pseudo-police gear and issuing threatening letters that look like they're backed by the court system.
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It's not piracy (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks Canada! (Score:2)
We owe you one, eh!
Question about Canada and "media tax" (Score:1)
Don't Canadians already pay an extra fee/tax on call recording media? Wasn't this supposed to off set losses due to improper copying? And isn't there an extra fee/tax on Internet bills to cover the same sort of thing? I really don't know one way or the other, which is why I'm asking.
Re: Question about Canada and "media tax" (Score:4, Informative)
There are levies on certain devices, and recordable media (writable CDs), now-a-days dubbed as the "ipod tax".
It only covers personal use, technically. Sharing content while making a profit is still illegal (eg. File sharing site with ads on it), and punishable with hefty fines and possible jail time.
Sharing with friends and family is a grey area, and generally regarded as safe to do.
Basicslly as long you're only downloading for personal use, there is nothing the media corps can do about it. If you seed back into the torrent swarm, however, it gets a little muddier, as technically you are contributing to sharing the content.
Android based TV boxes that use illegal streams (usually from China) are rampant around here, though, as technically there is no uploading or contributing back to the "illegal" sharing of content, so they are generally accepted as legal by the public.
Lots of gotcha's but all in all generally regarded as legal, fair use of content.
There is no additional taxes or levies on internet connections that I am aware of.
Re: Question about Canada and "media tax" (Score:4, Informative)
Also the caps on penalties are more reasonable here, making the "Pay us 5000, or we'll sue you for 1,000,000" threat ineffective. The max for non-commercial infringement up here is 5k. Since that's the max, in most circumstances, the judge would prove a much lower cost, say 100-200$.
Quoting directly: "(b) in a sum of not less than $100 and not more than $5,000 that the court considers just, with respect to all infringements involved in the proceedings for all works or other subject-matter, if the infringements are for non-commercial purposes."
The copyright trolls haven't been too interested since then.
background if you're interested:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/201... [michaelgeist.ca]
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The other nice thing about this is that it's $ 5,000 per person, not per infringed work. :) Trying to sue a single person for having a couple hundred MP3 and MKV files on their computer wouldn't be worth the filing fees for most law firms.
We've really tried to shift enforcement operations over to the commercial copiers and seeders, and not the individual end-users. Which is pretty much the opposite way of the ol' US.
The RCMP has also come out publically saying it's not worth their time to investigate indi
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Shoe on the other foot (Score:2, Insightful)
How would Americans feel if a Canadian IP rights agency was trying to influence American laws and how things were done down there?
Something tells me that it wouldn't be acceptable.
I know not all Americans feel the same way but this is how a country alienates its self from the rest of the world and given how much content the US provides for the rest of the world, these actions might be instrumental to the loss of profit in the content creators as the rest of the world stops playing this game.
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Toronto also gets a lot of crews
*AA wants to be payed again to move to a new syste (Score:2)
*AA wants to be payed again to for you to move your content to an new system. Hell they think ripping your own cd's to play on a phone / ipod / etc is Piracy and they want to resell the same thing again with added DRM and some times even added DLC want that higher bit rate pay more.
I have seen this with payed emulation systems they do less then the free and ones that come before the payed ones. Why can't they just sell the roms?
At least with dos box games you can take the files as you want* and with thing l
Yet another reason (Score:2)
I am very happy to be Canadian.
Not that there is any paucity of reasons of late.
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National treatment under the Berne Convention (Score:2)
Rightsholders is a condition defined in American law
I thought "owner of copyright" was defined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), to which all WTO members are a party.
which becomes extinct at US borders
A party to the Berne Convention is required to give the author of a work originating in a different country the same exclusive rights that it gives to authors in the same country.
Life of grandchildren (Score:2)
The original intent under the Berne Convention was that exclusive rights subsist for the life of those heirs most likely to understand and apply the author's intent in the exploitation of a work, namely the author's children and grandchildren. The copyright term of 50 years after the death of the author, set in the early twentieth century, was thus intended to approximate the life of the author's grandchildren [copyrightalliance.org]. The 20-year extension that began in Europe in the 1990s was intended to reflect the dramatic incr
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was watching Deadwood on Kodi the other day & my friend says "hey you know this is on amazon video right, youve got amazon prime, why arent you watching it there instead?"
I hadnt really thought of it, i suppose its because Kodi has a nicer interface? TBH i hadnt even searched for it on amazon, i just assumed it wasnt there, or only half of it was, or there would be commercials or some shit, Kodi -just works- so thats what im using.
Even when the legal source costs me nothing, i still go to the pirate
It's their fault (Score:2)
Welcome to the Annual BullShit report about Canada (Score:1)
Every god damn year this report comes out, and it lies like a Sean Spicer press briefing.
The 301 watchlist report is trotted out every year. and every year Canada is one on the great boogy men to chase. Its a bad report that has little objective evidence in it, and is at most an industry ad propaganda briefing. Im sure there will be a detailed analysis out shortly, but here is one of Dr. Geists past looks at this annual right of **AA venting its spleen "because Hollywood is doomed if we don't fix this"
the money they lose this way (Score:1)
Four points from a Canadian (Score:2)
1) BS
Firstly it should be pointed out that all the data that they have used in the past about how Canada is a haven for copyright infringement has been disproved. Multiple times. The numbers they use are largely made up, and have no real basis in reality. So them coming out again, with more of the same BS should be rightly ignored.
2) REP
As the first point alludes, their reputation for bending "facts" as it suits them really isn't doing their cause or reputation any favors. In addition, in Canada they once h