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File Sharing Legal In Canada

Foust is SO authentic

18:20 / 31.03.04

CBC Reports.

TORONTO - People who share music files on the internet are safe after a Federal Court rejected a motion on Wednesday that would have allowed the music industry to sue them.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein said the Canadian Recording Industry Association hadn't shown copyright infringement by 29 people who had allowed their music files to be uploaded.

Making files available in online, shared directories is within the bounds of Canadian copyright law, von Finckenstein ruled.

Sure, it'll be appealed by armies of lawyers, but for now, share away, my fellow Canadians.

20:42 / 31.03.04

There goes the music industry if that gets accepted in other places.

21:14 / 31.03.04

Oh boo hoo.

Thanks for this info - I'm writing my dissertation on the subject.

00:43 / 01.04.04

Hooray! Share 'em if you got 'em!

Part of the reason it's legal here is because we pay a tax on blank cassettes and CDs to offset the cost of lost revenue to the industry, so 'bah' to the music industry. They'll live.

03:26 / 01.04.04

Oh boo hoo.

It will be if there's no fucking music industry.

boo hoo back.

03:27 / 01.04.04

........

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

13:14 / 01.04.04

Jack, do you think that people will really stop making music if others continue to download? Big music companies have a choke hold on the radio stations. I no longer listen to any of the radio stations here in town except one. The one I listen to is a small college station that plays a lot of music that no one else can, due to corporately mandated playlists.

I understand the arguement that downloading music circumvents the copyright protections that artists have. I don't really feel like getting into a pissing contest about that point.

I just don't think that the "music industry" will go away. I do feel that it will emerge as a completely different animal than it is now. I also feel that it will be better for the artists. I have spoken with an artist who lives 2,000 miles away from me. He was ecstatic that someone that far away had even heard of him, much less listened to him regularly. If it weren't for internet radio, I never would have discovered his music. I believe that the business model for the industry will change, not disapear.

15:33 / 01.04.04

YARR! Tis a fine day indeed, me hearties. Why, the crew have given up their usual collection of scurrilous sea shanties, an' the decks resound with the sound of our national anthem. True North, strong and free, indeed.

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

18:32 / 01.04.04

I really hope that this article is an April Fools day joke. According to the article, a US Senate committee has approved a bill in which "an Internet user who makes available $1,000 in copyrighted materials with prison terms of up to three years and fines of up to $250,000." The article fails to mention how the value of the content is determined.

I checked the congress web site and this bill doesn't have an update since last summer. I want to believe this is just a scary-assed April Fool's joke by news.com.

19:07 / 01.04.04

Current copyright legislation allows for quite extraordinary fines, along those lines, if you have a lot of different tracks, because they're aimed at companies who are commercially distributing them rather than individuals. So those amounts are not at all unbelievable. They're probably a reduction, actually.

As for Canada - well, it's not quite true that file sharing is legal. Offering a copyrighted file for download is not a copyright breach, according to this. Downloading it still is, as far as I'm aware.

20:54 / 01.04.04

But that pretty much equals the warning you see at the beginning of rented movies: "Pirates face up to 20 years in prison, $250,000 fine, etc." This may be worse though as they seem to be making extra efforts to make examples out of file-sharers...