How?

Seems to me the question is how do you allow transfer from one device to the other without also allowing the opportunity for wholesale abuse? You can make it illegal to create 1,000 copies, but if it's easy to do then we all know that it will be done. No one is going to monitor it or seriously enforce such a law. I think the only way to slow down piracy is to make it technically more difficult.

Canada does need to better protect the labour of its authors, musicians, and filmmakers. Is it such a big deal when it makes things a bit more inconvenient for consumers? Are we that selfish?

Digital Locks! What's Next?

Virtual locks? Why not real hardware locks on our libraries, after all students may go there and copy information from a book that is copy written by one of our American publisher friends. While we are at it lets lock up the parliamentary library so that only members of the ruling majority government will have access.

My digital copyright on what I have said here does not prevent you from reading it, but it could cost you at least two Harpoonies to copy it.

Re: How?

@Booker: please read the article. The issue is not inconvenience. Instead, it is the large cost built right into the Harperight copyright bill for switching content to a new device. The bill forces you to buy the content all over again even though you have paid for it already.

I do agree with you that "Canada does need to better protect the labour of its authors, musicians, and filmmakers." But DRM (digital restrictions management) is not the way to do that since the result is you pay the corporate slave masters of content makers essentially all the money while the actual content makers get virtually nothing. Instead, we need a convenient way to pay content makers directly thus cutting out big corporations who are doing nothing but collecting money for themselves and lobbying fiercely for that unfairness to continue.

DRM incompatible with copyright

This illustrates the incompatibility of DRM with copyright.

A key component of any fair copyright law is that the work must eventually pass in to the Public Domain. There are also certain activities - known as Fair Dealing in Canada - that are considered non-infringing due to the benefit to society these activities bring.

That is the public's side of the copyright bargain. We uphold, with the full force of law, the author's limited monopoly on the distribution of his or her work, and in exchange the work passes in to the Public Domain after a reasonable period of time.

Unfortunately, the public's side of that bargain has been eroded over the years by continued extensions to the number of years copyright lasts.

By putting digital locks in place, the rights holder is further preventing the work from being able to eventually enter the Public Domain, especially if citizens are prevented by law from circumventing such a lock for any reason, as this bill proposes to do.

If you invent something, you are given the choice of seeking a patent, but having to fully describe your invention and allow it to be copied by others once your patent expires, or guard your trade secret from your competitors yourself (think of Coca Cola's "secret recipe").

Authors of creative works should be given the same choice: copyright your work but release it unencumbered by DRM so others may exercise their rights under Fair Dealing and the work may eventually enter the Public Domain, or forgo copyright and preserve your monopoly on distribution via DRM.

The problem with current and proposed copyright law is that it gives rights holders all of the benefits of a legally enforced monopoly on distribution, without meeting their obligations to the public in exchange for this protection.

Worse, by making reasonable, every day activities (like transferring your legally purchased music to another device so you can enjoy it at your convenience) illegal, it makes an ass of the law, and decreases the chance that honest citizens will respect copyright.

This suits the cartel of media conglomerates who are quick to sue infringers and receive settlements in the thousands or judgements in the hundreds of thousands per infringement, but leaves independant artists fighting an uphill battle with the very people they hope to engage with their art.

Copyright only works if the public's interests are accorded the same amount of respect as those of the rights holder.

re How

airwin, your comment about "corporate slave masters" hardly is relevant to indie publishing or music publishing and recording in Canada. Even corporate publishers actually do create something of value. In many cases you can pay artists directly, but that still doesn't deal with the fact that you wouldn't even have to do that if everything can be copied for free. The "inconvenience" I referred to is in fact paying for another copy (support the arts, eh?).

I have heard the argument by comsmicsyn (above) before re: the public "right" to a creator's work and it just strikes me as weird. Where does the public get off thinking they have an inherent right to an artist's work? The artist gets to decide who has the right to his or her work. Fair dealing provides a limited use for educational purposes, not a carte blanche to pirate someone else's labour.

I would love to see society's attitudes towards artists, writers, musicians, and other creators change to something more respectful. It seems really puzzling to me that, particularly among the left, artists' labour is so poorly valued. If they were making furniture no one would think they could just take the stuff, so why don't we respect a song, or a photograph, or a story? There seems to be an attitude that the work of artists isn't real labour. With public attitudes like that, especially among people who allegedly support worker's rights, artists will remain the poorest sector of our society. (Please spare me the self-serving and hackneyed "corporate masters" argument -- you aren't just ripping off The Man, you're ripping off their clients). The bottom line is that anti-copyright activists just like getting stuff for free.

Treat me better, Tyee

While I certainly feel that in the big picture this is an important issue, and I don't disagree with the central point, I really don't appreciate the somewhat pathetic news hook. This story really has nothing to do with the PlayBook per se, does it? And the Tories aren't really against it, are they, despite that being a sure-fire attention grabber.

And what about these hypothetical scenarios? As far as buying content for your iPad and then having to re-purchase them for a PlayBook, well yes, it sucks that differing formats and DRM cause this to happen, but this is neither unique to iPads, PlayBooks and Tory governments, nor is it new. Who's going to pay for me replacing all that music on cassette tapes in my basement, I'd like to know. Who's party platform is that in?

The author also builds up the straw man of the first-time tablet buyer who "may wish to transfer their DVD collection to their new portable PlayBook". DVD collection on a flash memory tablet? How big is your DVD collection? Three movies? Five? And anyway, how does that have anything uniquely to do with the PlayBook?

This article dubs it a "PlayBook Tax". Why is that? If there's a good reason why I should think this proposal unfairly benefits "foreign-owned entertainment and technology companies -- particularly RIM's chief rival Apple", it's certainly not evident from reading this article. Unless of course what you really mean is that everyone else has been eating RIM's lunch for the past few years, and it will be desperately hard to catch up. In that case, I'd completely agree.

gerard, apologies...

the headline could be said to be a bit too tongue in cheek. didn't mean to signal the Tories sat in a room and tried to figure out how to hurt RIM. It would be like running a story that said McDonald's hamburgers have a high fat content, and running the headline (tongue firmly in cheek) Why Doesn't McDonald's Like Your Heart?

I sincerely doubt that

I sincerely doubt that anybody would follow said law if it was passed.

Licenses should be for the product, not tied down to data on a specific item.