Liberty Loving Conservatives? Not likely.

134 Replies to “Liberty Loving Conservatives? Not likely.”

1. It may be the case, Lance, that to [your] mind, [you’re] buying the medium which contains the data, but to my mind, you’re buying what the contract says you’re buying.
   I think, Lance, that whether or not you are stealing a DVD when [you] move it from [your] Playstation 2 to the DVD player in [your] Linux desktop should depend entirely on the contractual terms under which you purchased the DVD. If it has a lock that normally requires a licensed player, which translates back into income for the DVD IP owner, then I think that if you pick that lock, you are a safe-cracker and a burglar.

2. Fair use is current law Vit. Moving the DVD to my Linux Desktop constitutes fair use under current law. This Bill will change that and I’m against it. It basically allows any EULA to determine what you can do and you and I both know that _no one_ reads EULA’s.
   Your income derives from intellectual property rights, I sympathize with your stance. Mine derives from having as many Linux Desktops in existence as possible. Sympathize with my stand.
   It’s moot anyway. As I mentioned at Abandoned Stuff, this Bill will pass pending a prorogue or election.
   I’ve no options, no repast, but to tell my clients that the Conservatives are going to make them criminals because they choose and I’ve sold a better OS.
   And the folks here will continue to berate me for not voting for the CPC next election.
   C’est la vie. I guess I’ll join the ranks of those who haven’t registered their firearms. Criminal.
   Cheers,
   lance

3. “Has Stephen Harper lost it?”
   No, he hasn’t. He is picking his battles. Don’t underestimate him.
   As an economist he probably favors deregulation of the CRTC.
   Allowing competition in any regulated market is a hard sell after key players have become entrenched. (CWB, CRTC, etc.)
   C-61 ‘should be’ just a bone thrown at the major operators of ISP’s and wireless companies to keep their exec’s happy while he opens up access to the wireless marketplace.
   Lowering telecoms costs to Canadians would be a coup.
   C-61 is not enforceable (imo)and not a threat, as is the Gun Registry, to privacy.
   It’s a stupid law set up to work a stupid system.
   Harper’s NOT stupid.
   G

4. Just to be clear Lance.
   I’m on your side. This bill sucks. I hope it is for a greater good. (see G @9:05)
   I hope you reconsider voting Con. It would be a shame to loose you.
   G

5. And I’m in favour of C-61, Lance, at least in principle, because I don’t think the sense of fair use in current bit-medium law adequately protects the rights of intellectual property owners. I’m in favour of traditional fair use, say an excerpt from a book or essay, a snippet from a video, or a thumbnail of an image as a link hot-spot.
   Nevertheless, traditional fair use does not include whole-sale copying. Traditional fair use does not include making a complete copy of a book you’ve duly purchased, unless it is out of copyright, and there are no other relevant provisos on the purchase contract.
   Fair use has an intellectual property law tradition in Canadian society, it doesn’t just mean what you’ve become accustomed to for the last few years. And we’ve gotten behind on adjusting to the new bit-copier technology. Remember, the old atom-copiers like audio and video magnetic tape recorders always degraded, and so there was always residual value to the IP owner in producing a master first-copy. Not so with bits.
   I don’t think this is about firearm registration.
   I don’t think this is about freedom of speech.
   If you have a specific problem with a specific clause, or three, Lance, why not write up a careful rebuttal, or better yet counter-proposal, all appropriately referenced to the proposed act, and post it here at SDA, or your own blog, and invite each of us to build a letter around that to send to the appropriate list of ministers and MPs who you might recommend.
   Until I hear a proper well thought out legislative counter argument, bill C-61 will have no effect on my continuing to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada.

6. G,
   It’s only the people who don’t want to break the law, that care about this being a law. It won’t make a bit of difference to anyone else (like the gun registry).
   Vitruvius – “but to my mind, you’re buying what the contract says you’re buying.”
   I had a look at one of my son’s DVDs to see what contract my son bought. In the smallest letters possible it said subject to “Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment’s standard terms of trade”. Should be easy to google, right?

7. Look, Ural, if you have to break a lock, if you have to be a safe-cracker, you don’t need to read the contract unless you’re looking for an exemption. It’s obvious to a reasonable man, it’s in your face, you’re not supposed to do that, otherwise they wouldn’t have put it there in the first place. Now, if they said it was not locked, and it was, then you would have them for fraud under false advertising. But they didn’t. So you don’t.
   Caveat emptor secus emptor culpa.

8. Vitruvius,
   How, exactly, do I know if the DVD is “locked” or not if it’s still in the cellophane?
   Why do 7/11s have locks on the doors?

9. DVDs are locked by default, Ural, unless stated otherwise. Always have been ~ they have country codes. In the early days, when people freaked out, many vendors gave refunds. You’re supposed to know that by now. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, otherwise idiots would be free to commit crimes. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.

10. Trying to play off the Conservatives against the Liberals would make a lot more sense if we were up against the Jean Cretien Liberals. Dion (and Ray who seems like the #2 man these days) is far to the left. The moderates of the Liberal party (like Manley & McKenna) have been driven off.
    The Liberals were relatively benign in the 90’s. Don’t assume that will be true in the 2010’s.

11. This whole discussion is moot. Until we have an iron clad property rights Bill or Act. As it is you only rent what you buy . Even artists strictly don’t own there material. PET made sure Private property was erased knowing its the foundation of a capitalist economy. The ones we have are only given by the government due to change by whim. Same with the gun control law or any other that I see the Harperites have not changed either. Its completely legal for the authorities to confiscate any goods including homes with an easy bench warrant from any judge. You do not own any mineral rights only the Province collectively (read government of the day) does, & can sell them. It was not always this way in Canada until after they first world war.
    So downloading material & being charged is really not about the artists copyright but control of individual Canadians social habits since private property is a none issue in this Nation. You own nothing really but what the several levels of government allow you with no protection at all legally.
    So now we have no ownership rights, no free speech, or Religion that is now is suspect. With the result that a man can be forced to recant his own conscience. I would say Canada is in real trouble. Yet the Conservative act like its just another day where they make more canucks criminals & alienate the youth. By a badly crafted law with a whip as usual. This issue is more than this flawed Bill or the internet. This is just another grab by Ngo’s with there lobbies demanding to be the middlemen for more profit.
    Just my opinion

12. You make a very compelling argument Lance. I am with you all the way on this one.

13. The deeper fundamental question comes into play here when you consider what is being protected. Is the DVD or CD an “intellectual property” or a manufactured product? I submit they are all manufactured products, not intellectual properties. The songs on a CD are the result of a creative process for which only the very early stages form the intellectual property. In essence, a CD is no different than any manufactured good. It has an initial design stage that constitutes the ‘intellectualism” – the rest of it is the product of a variety of manufacturing processes. The entire concept of licensing of an entire product on the basis of one small part of its development and manufacturer is a draconian process. Certainly – copyright or patent key components of it, but the manufactured product should be subject to the same limitations as any other manufactured product. No more, no less.
    With regard to software, licensing should end the minute support is withdrawn for the code, or upon release of the next version (replacing the original version in substantial form and function). Software has a larger single source intellectual component than a CD or DVD (maybe), but its still a manufactured product. Further, If software is to be distributed by license only, then remove the liability clauses – if you’re not prepared to sell it and “release” your claim to it, you must be prepared to accept the consequential circumstances of your licensed product’s use. This is the major problem with intellectual property – imagine how much better Microsoft’s bastard code would have been been if Bill had actually been held accountable for the performance of his licensed products.

14. Cost of proposed legislation:
    -makes it annoying for me to download and copy stuff.
    Benefits of proposed legislation:
    -targets and angers my political opponents a lot more than it might inconvenience me. I haven’t seen the left this fired up since they were instructed by the media to be fired up for the gay marriage debate.
    -stems flow of low-quality music, movies, videos, and TV, all of which are salted with Marxism, to the lumpenproletariat, who are brainwashed enough as it is.
    -good to see the apathy that has served the left so well for decades come back to bite it in the ass. When some 22 year old sociology major\activist gets fined twenty grand for downloading the latest “Grey’s Anatomy” episode or 50 Cent’s latest musings on “bitches and hos”, my sympathy will be limited, because they didn’t speak up when much greater injustices ocurred.
    Judging by the reaction, it is fair to describe Canadians as a people who care more about illegal downloading than free speech, national defense, healthcare, taxes, employment, immigration, the economy, foreign relations, the fate of western civilization, fiscal solvency, etc.

15. To me this whole thing is getting way out hand.
    The whole concept of fair use is that when you purchase something you have the right to use it for whatever private purpose you wish including:
    Making a backup copy.
    Converting to other formats for your own use.
    It does not give you the right to:
    Give copies to your friends and family in a different household.
    Redistribute it on the net.
    The bill should be aimed at protecting fair use and stopping the illegal distribution. It does not.
    All I can say is that it is a good thing that nobody holds a copyright on the English language because if the same laws were applied as they are to other creative works we would not be allowed to:
    1/ Repeat what someone else has said without their specific permission.
    2/ Talk in public without paying an extra fee.
    3/ Read a book in the living room if we have only licenced it for the bathroom.

16. Your definition of fair use is wrong, Kevin. And no-one’s proposing preventing you from carrying your book around, what’s being debated is whether or not you should be able to copy it, if it is in copyright, and you don’t have permission from the copyright holder. But why should you be able to read a book in the living room if you have explicitly licensed it only for reading in the bathroom?
    No wonder Canada has had so much liberal government when even putative conservatives are against contract and property law, and are in favour of theft by greedy children and anti-property marxists.

17. It’s a long long way from being time to give this incarnation of the PC’s the Mulroney treatment and the options are simply giving up and allowing things to return to that intolerable past. Posted by: OMMAG at June 17, 2008 9:22 PM
    It sounds like you have accepted that as an inevitability. And it is.
    It won’t take too long until conservatives in Canada realize they are not well represented by The Conservative Party of Canada.

18. Vitruvius – I will refrain from name calling because I believe that a proper debate does not include personal attacks.
    In response to your comment
    First of all you should not assume that all conservative supporters are conservative. Many of us lean toward libertarian values and support the Conservatives because they have traditionally been strong on individual rights too.
    Secondly it is the government that gets to decide what a copyright holder can write into their contracts. That is what this bill is all about.

19. Vit,
    “But why should you be able to read a book in the living room if you have explicitly licensed it only for reading in the bathroom?”
    You may not have a moral right to read the book in the living room if you agreed to read it in the bathroom, but you do have a right to privacy. The copyright holder can write all kinds of conditions, but he also has no moral right to enforce those conditions if it involves infringing on an individual’s private activities.
    Any private activity which affects anyone else is no longer a private activity, so don’t even try to come up with an example.
    I will say this again: The only practical implication of enshrining these rights for copyright holders in law is reduced personal privacy and increased state control of our lives.

20. “Judging by the reaction, it is fair to describe Canadians as a people who care more about illegal downloading than free speech, national defense, healthcare, taxes, employment, immigration, the economy, foreign relations, the fate of western civilization…” — Logical Person, 8:18 am
    No kidding. I had no idea. The, uhh, extent and nature of the reaction doesn’t bode well for the character of the conservative side.
    I thought the libertarian/right cared most about the right to private property, but judging by this discussion what they want is the full right to their own private property, and a concomitant right to access others’ private property and do what they wish with it.
    If someone violates their own private property, why, it’s trespassing, expropriation, confiscatory taxation, or theft, whereas if they violate someone else’s, it’s fair use *because THEY say so.*
    And they’re willing to bring the conservatives down, to allow the Liberals to finish the job they started in 1968 — to transfer trillions to the UN in the name of a fake climate scam, to take away our free speech, etc., simply because a Conservative bill that hasn’t even had public consultation yet might get in the way of their illegal downloading and their right to violate copyright by picking digital locks.
    Priorities.
    Incroyable.

21. “Clergy sing Happy Birthday to Pope Benedictus XVI at the White House on April 16, 2008, his 81st birthday.”
    Don’t look like greedy children … must be anti-property marxists.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

22. Ok there is a huge huge huge misunderstanding going on here in this discussion by pete and others. Let me state this clearly:
    Copying a legally bought CD that you own to your computer that has a no-copy bit set on it will result in fine’s of 500$ per song.
    Copying a legally bought DVD that you own to your computer will result in fines.
    Linux cannot (because of the GPL and other agreements that it operates under) will not and can not pay licensing fee’s for legal DVD decoders. When I buy a DVD, am I entering a contractual agreement to not modify the data? When you download a CD and change it to a different format, you’re doing the same thing as decrypting a DVD on linux, so why are the two cases treated separately? It is MY data, I OWN those bits and bytes. Now, I can’t redistribute it, but I can do absolutely whatever I want with it on my computer or my devices.
    “Let’s say you purchase a legal copy of a physical device that isn’t principally a collection if bit representations, for example, a TV, a pen, a book, &c. Let’s say it’s stolen, or breaks down. Should you now be able to steal another one to replace it because you’ve already paid for one?”
    Vit, this is worse than an apples to oranges comparison, it’s a zebra’s to ants comparison. Music is a one time work. The artist records it, and it is produced. The CD’s themselves and the process of writing the data to them costs a handful of cents, and in the case of electronic distribution, it’s even cheaper. However, pens, tv’s, etc. cost money, you’re paying for the object itself, not some information or media that is contained within it.
    What you’re describing doesn’t make any sense with regards to intellectual property. If I wanted to have unlimited numbers of a particular model of TV, or unlimited copies of a single song on my computer, which costs more? The artist didn’t have to record it 1 million times for me just so I could keep it on my computer, whereas the tv would have to be built 1 million times so I could have 1 million tv’s.
    As to the belief that we need solid copyright law to create alternatives to these lock in strategies by the recording industry and film industry, I agree. HOWEVER, the way it’s been implemented in the U.S. has turned into a large scale campaign of extortion by those organizations. By instituting an identical but even more severe set of legislation, we’re opening up Canadians to litigation on a scale previously unheard of in Canada.
    Now, I’m not just talking about pirates. Round them all up, fine them, whatever. The problem is that the method used by record companies to target individuals is extremely imprecise, and to reduce that imprecision requires a reduction in civil liberties without any solid or conclusive evidence whatsoever.
    Even if we are talking about fining pirates, it’s a civil damages suit, not a criminal one. In that case, the person who has had their copyright violated must prove the damages that they have experienced as a result of the broken copyright. Now, at 500$ a song, we are assuming that every single person who ever gets charged under these new laws has distributed 500 copies of that song…but wait a minute, how can EVERYONE distribute 500 copies? Let’s say 1 million people share a song. How can each person share 500 copies? That would mean that in fact 500 million people shared the song, instead of the actual 1 million.
    Then there’s the tired argument that I’m not sure if I really subscribe to that if the user had to actually pay for that stolen music or video that they would never have watched it in the first place. In theory I agree, but it does seem fairly lame…if I had to pay for donuts from Tim Hortons, I wouldn’t, but if offered them for free, I’d eat them….yeah, doesn’t make much sense really.

23. And let me clear this up for people like pete and EBD who can’t seem to get this through their head:
    No one here is advocating the sharing of media, the downloading of media for free, or the sharing between friends of songs and videos. This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the argument. Neither Lance nor I advocate piracy activity in the slightest, we simply believe that we should be able to do whatever the hell we want with our own property that’s been legally purchased.

24. And I think what you should be able to do with property you have
    purchased should be governed by the terms of the purchase contract.

25. Vit, property you have purchased becomes *your* property.
    You can not both own property *and* have it dictated to you by a contract how you use it. If it is dictated to you how you can use it by a contract you have not purchased it, and are merely leasing or renting it.
    However, this discussion has *nothing* to do with purchasing property. It has to do with purchasing a license to use another person’s intellectual property. A license to use a certain IP only in your bathroom is completely impractical to enforce without the state allowing unwarranted search and seizure. Last I checked libertarians were FOR property rights and against statism. But nobody has successfully argued against my point that the ONLY practical implication of this law is reduced personal privacy and increased state control of the economy and our lives.

26. test

27. barjebus, there certainly is a huge misunderstanding. Lance started this off with a statement that “In order to enjoy my bought and paid for DVD’s on Linux I must use the DeCSS libraries. This Bill makes my fair use illegal”. This statement is completely false. Lance is stating that in order to use DVD’s on Linux, he MUST use a pirating tool and break the copy protection. This is not true. And your statement about Linux being prevented from offering a legit DVD player is also untrue. Anyone can develop an APPLICATION to run on linux, and anyone can purchase a CSS key. There is nothing in the GPL that states that APPLICATIONS need to be GPL’ed too. So Lance has the OPTION of writing a DVD player, and buying a CSS key, and enjoying his bought and paid for DVD’s legitimately. However, due to the prohibitive cost, as well as time and background knowledge required, he has chosen instead to take the easier route and break the encryption. I can’t say that I blame him. My only point, and I stress it again: Lance has CHOSEN to run Linux, even though he knows there’s no licensed DVD player, and he has CHOSEN to break the CSS encryption.

28. Vit, I can’t believe you just made that statement. You of all people. I’m speechless.

29. I’m in agreement with Lance on this issue but I’m still undecided on how I will vote in the next election. The combination of lack of action on firearms registry, HRC’s, and bills C-51 and C-61 are quite disturbing and I don’t like statists.
    To watch DVD’s on my computer I have to use DeCSS as I detest having to wait for time wasting sections of the DVD to play which conventional players can’t skip over. I’ve paid for the DVD and what I do with the bits once they’re on my computer is no-ones business.
    I don’t believe in DRM which is the most regressive step that has happened with programming. I have a hard enough time now just trying to keep my unencrypted data backed up and transferred to newer forms of storage without having to worry about DRM. I was fortunate to find someone with an 800 bpi tape drive to get my 25 year old program tapes read but my programs on punched cards and paper tape are as good as lost. If DRM is tied to specific hardware or requires access to a website for authentication then this will likely result in loss of access to the information when hardware changes or the company goes out of business. For this reason I use only open source software whenever possible and my EMR system is the open source Oscar which allows me to tinker with source code as much as I wish.
    While I don’t have the time to do much of it now, cracking software protection used to be an interesting intellectual exercise and then I spent most of my time looking at debugger screens single stepping through code looking for copy protection sections and bypassing them. I view this as freedom to tinker and will continue to do this regardless of what laws exist to criminalize private hacking. Curiousity is what drives me and if something is deliberately hidden I have to find out what it is.
    That said, all of my commercial software has been purchased legally and I do read EULA’s. I can’t use large numbers of programs because I disagree with the EULA terms and so have to use Ghostscript to view many PDF files as I won’t agree with Adobe’s terms to use Acrobat. I use open office and open source browsers and will never buy a machine with vista installed.
    There has been a distressing increase in secrecy when it comes to software and hardware recently. I’ve had to agree to online NDA’s just to view datasheets for some microprocessors which is absurd. Other chips that I’ve been interested in simply don’t have the datasheets available at al. There hasn’t been a single book along the lines of Inside Windows by Pietrek et al and this is directly as a result of the DMCA which has criminalized disassembly of proprietary OS’s to see how they work. I used to write VxD’s for Win 3.1, but now M$ has made it essentially impossible to write custom device drivers for vista. As someone who likes to have direct access to ones hardware this is completely unacceptable.
    What concerns me is that hackers are going to be marginalized and then criminalized. I’ve been hacking computers for over 40 years now and have no intention of curbing my curiousity. The incredible innovation that has happened in hardware and software is the result of curious hackers tinkering and sharing information. Laws such as DMCA and C-61 will have a chilling effect on this process and need to be opposed by all those who will to see computer inovation continue.

30. Fine, so what’s next? Well, C-61 will go to committee, where they will fix a number of problems that many of you have been criticizing, and they will break even more things resulting in a bill that is worse than this one. And then, I suspect, C-61 will die on the order paper; I would be surprised to see it move through a hostile parliament and senate before at the latest autumn 2009. The Conservatives will be left with a “tough on crime” feather in their cap, and nothing will have changed, at least formally.
    But if not before then, things will change in the next parliament. Technology is evolving. The way people use it is changing. What was once an experiment, or hobby, or toy, is now in some cases becoming an infrastructure utility. Things will not stay the same. Biologists have a word for stasis, they call it death.
    Yet even more imporantly, perhaps, for the moment at least, and at least for me, is that I think this has been an excellent discussion. Those of you who have been arguing against some of my arguments have at a minimum helped me reconsider my positions carefully, and more likely, my positions at the margin have problably shifted a bit in the directions you would like. Hopefully, my arguments against some of yours have had the same effect.
    On that note, folks, good night, best wishes, and
    as always thanks to our lovely hostess Miss Kate.

31. Not to reopen this as I think that everyone has had their say.
    Angus Reid came out today with a poll on C-61:
    Here
    Interesting. BC, AB and males are the most against. Can you say core constituency?
    Oops.
    Cheers,
    lance

32. lance,
    The poll says that most Canadians don’t understand the question. For or agin.

33. loki: what kind of punch cards/program? Sounds like a fun project for some CompSci students, where do you live?
    EBD: “The things that people typically do, like recording something they wish to view later, is not illegal at all unless the source is illegal, as in, you’ve stolen your neighbour’s cable signal or bought the material from a bootlegger, which are illegal anyway.”
    Enter the Broadcast Flag. The source, in this case, will be perfectly legal to watch; your standard DTV set will do. And many people do watch Digital TV, and more will watch as more of the world gets cut over. What happens there is that the station tells your set top box not to allow you to record whatever program is involved, and your set top box follows this order. More and more programming, often for very little reason, has this flag set. Result? You won’t legally be able to record them, even though it’ll be technically feasible, easy, even.
    Logical person: you think it’s going to stop here? Some of us non-conservatives have seen this coming from a long way off(myself, during the DeCSS debacle it was pretty clear either the Liberals or Conservatives would try something similar to the DMCA), it isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last unjust restriction on our freedom.
    hlyrad: You say this is all unenforcable now. I hope to SERVER that you’re right. But what kind of argument is that? “Oh, the gun registry is unenforcable, therefor we should allow it to happen”? This bill will waste billions of taxpayer dollars as special secret-police IP-cops draw salaries, and as Canadian companies across the IT sector are neutered.
    Vit: the problem is that the Liberals and Conservatives are agreeing on the worst parts of the bill; if you take the intersection of C60(liberals) and C61 you will still get an ugly, ugly bill. DMCA-like anticircumvention is a core component of this bill, and will not be removed, and *that* is the problem that all of this focuses around.
    pete: you make some good points, but it all centers around the ability to choose to buy the DVD in the first place. After all, we choose to consume media, don’t we? (Personally, I don’t choose to buy DVDs/watch MPAA released films).

34. It’s useful to take a step back and remember what copyright is. It’s a bargain made between society at large and creators. Creators create creative works: songs, films, books, stories, paintings, photographs, etc. Society enjoys those works. The works are of such a nature that they are easily distributed amongst society simply by one person conveying them to another person: telling the story, singing the song, sketching the painting. The enjoyment of the person who originally viewed the film, heard the song, saw the painting, is by no means diminished in sharing that work with another. As Thomas Jefferson once said, (paraphrasing) “He who receives light from me, does so without lessening mine.”
    Creators obviously get a bad deal here; they create the work, share it with the first person, and then the work spreads with no farther need for them. There is no incentive for the creator to create the work. Society recognized this, and proposed the deal of copyright: for a limited time, the creator is given a set of exclusive rights to the work. In exchange, after that limited time, the work is set free, and all may enjoy it freely.
    So the deal was struck, and the balance was set. A limited time of exclusive rights, then freedom. Except over the past century, the balance keeps moving, and always in the same direction: more for the creator, less for society. The term of copyright, originally as short as 14 years in the United States, has expanded to potentially over a century depending on the lifespan of the author. Works covered by copyright, originally requiring registration, now automatic. Technological shifts not foreseen under the original bargain, the creator refuses to yield on. May society format-shift a work? No, the creators say! In fact, we want a lock put on any work we choose, that society may not break! With the full penalty of the law put behind it! And we won’t even promise to maintain a way you can open the lock! So when the copyright on that work does expire, you still may not be able to legally access it!
    So society asks, well, what do we get in return for this? And the creators say, nothing. So why should it be a surprise when society says, THIS WASN’T PART OF THE DEAL!
    Creators want a digital lock with the full force of law behind it? Let’s talk a much shorter copyright term in exchange. Creators want to be able to file lawsuits for hundreds, even thousands, of times a work’s value? Let’s talk mandatory registration fees. Until creators are willing to give something back in exchange for these new restrictions, I don’t feel that society owes them a damn thing.