Here is an interesting bit of news from ZeroPaid. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (aka Mounties for you Americans) have announced that they will no longer be targeting individuals who “pirate” copyrighted materials:
Christmas Hilaire recently told the French-language newspaper Le Devoir that “Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. Today it is so easy to copy. Everybody was taken by surprise and we do not know how to stop it.”Rather than allocate its limited resources on issues that are really of a private concern, it instead will allocate them to address issues that have broad, public implications.
“It addresses mainly crimes against intellectual property, which have an impact on the health and safety of consumers [medicines, electrical appliances, and so on.], but also those related to organized crime,” said Hilaire. “Our plate is pretty full with that, and unfortunately, the small, it does not have time to deal with them.”
I am pleased to see that RCMP is resisting falling into the trap of believing that their job is to enforce the economic rights of large corporations at the expense of devoting resources that affect the greater public. I was in a Chinese mall called Pacific Mall in Markham (just north of Toronto) a few months ago when the local police did a raid of all of the DVD shops, cleaning out what they believed to be pirated materials. There were a lot of police, and I was struck by the fact that so much police power was being devoted to protecting MPAA/CIAA-companies … aren’t they supposed to be protecting people?
Well, apparently the RCMP thinks so. Meanwhile, in US Congress, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act is under consideration again (previously known as the Piracy Act). The IPEA would allow the Department of Justice to file civil suits against file sharers, essentially saving the industry from having to pay its own way. Hey, why not just hand over the keys to the white house and the capitol to corporate CEOs and let them run the whole damned country? Oh wait, too late …
By the way, in the more good news from the Canuck side department, it turns out that a recent study shows a positive correlation between file-sharing and CD sales.
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Interesting contrast in the priorities of law enforcements on either side of that imaginary line.
Today, I heard Hillary Clinton describe how much money, how many buses, economic and other impacts,etc. would arise from deporting all the estimated 12 million +/- illegal immigrants. It just struck me as absurd to try to enforce it, and in a way that’s so liberating. Just like getting free music. Kind of.
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