Things are heating up as foreign interests beef up their rhetoric in the last few legs of the Canadian copyright consultation. The American Federation of Musicians responded to a political party’s (NDP) call for balanced copyright “disgusting”.
The copyright industry, which consists of almost entirely foreign interests, have already resorted to insulting the process. Throughout the whole process, a vast majority of Canadian submissions have called for expanding fair dealings and blocking blanket anti-circumvention legislation to name just two.
The tiny minority of people who have called for tighter copyright laws are feeling, unsurprisingly, threatened. The copyright industry managed to rig the most recent town hall meeting so as to shut out any dissenting voices to their calls.
Just hours after news broke that they stacked an entire townhall meeting in their favour, the Canadian Federation of Students revealed that when they found out about last minute changes to the consultation, they attempted to hand out fliers at the town hall meeting only to be threatened with arrest by security. From their press release:
Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement have been leading a round of public consultations on copyright reform. Thursday night’s meeting was one of two town halls designed to facilitate discussion from hundreds of live participants and online followers.
Because of the last-minute introduction of a lottery system that did not guarantee those participating the right to speak, students attempted to circulate a flyer detailing their position on copyright reform. Event organisers used private security guards to prevent the distribution of the flyers, threatening to remove the students from the premises of the hotel where the consultation was being held. The flyers contained an introduction to copyright that provided a summary of the results of campus copyright consultations held by the Canadian Federation of Students throughout Spring 2009.
“With the ever increasing cost of education, students should not have to pay even more to access the material they require to be able to study, research, and learn,” said Melanson. “It is ironic that while students are concerned that new legislation may allow copyright owners to lock up information, the government is locking up its own consultations.”
Here’s a copy of the flier that was handed out (PDF)
While not everyone agrees that the government is playing a roll in trying to tip the balance of the debate into the foreign copyright industry’s favour, there is increasing evidence that this is the case.
NDP MP Olivia Chow also helped to distribute the fliers, so she knows all about the incident where students were threatened with arrest. Unfortunately, the fallout has since deepened with the American Federation of Musicians issuing an e-mail, calling the calls for “balanced copyright” “disgusting”. Michael Geist has a copy of that e-mail:
Greetings to all.
I am attaching a flyer that was handed out by Olivia Chow at last night’s Copyright Town Hall meeting at the Royal York in Toronto. I am sure all of you will find its content equally as disgusting as I did.
In light of the fact that the NDP at its convention in Halifax this month dealt with a resolution identified as 6-21-09 Expanding Party Policy on “Supporting Canadian Creativity”, and showed clear support for “ensuring appropriate copyright protection so that creators are fairly compensated for their intellectual property”, I am shocked that both Chow and Charlie Angus are allowed to openly depart from party policy and directive, obviously just to shamelessly buy votes among young people and academics.
We intend on taking the NDP to task over this, and will accept nothing less than a retraction of Ms Chow’s statements and an apology.
What is there to apologize for? Exercising free speech or is the American Federation of Musicians also against free speech in general? Was it not enough to threaten your opponents with arrest and rig an entire town hall meeting, now you demand an apology because someone disagrees with you in a country where a vast majority of people who have spoken on the issue of copyright disagrees with you? Who’s really the disgusting one here?
It’s increasingly obvious that the copyright industry saw the consultation as a means where average Canadians can speak their mind and found it a threat to their outdated business models. So they have opted to fighting it on every level, by trying to paint it as a waste of time, then going so far as to hijack it to make it so that only one opinion is heard and even threaten their opponents with arrest – those opponents do include Canadian businesses, Canadian artists, Canadian consumers, Canadian educators and students, Canadian record labels, Canadian libraries and now, even Canadian MPs as well. We have a foreign copyright industry trying to meddle in the internal affairs of Canada and they are doing so by purveying myths that simply do not stack up to scrutiny whatsoever when real evidence is put forth.
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Me and my friends have been generating ‘IP’ collectively for twenty years. We own all the copyrights. All the music, all the books, all the art, is not the property of ‘corrupt corporations’ it is owned by us. For some of it we have partnered with corporations and they have helped us make money off of it by investing capital, but we own all our copyrights – every note and every word.
Me owning al lthis property in no way stops you from being creative and making your won stories and songs and records and paintings and films. It doesn’t stop you, on any country on earth – unless your idea of creativity is plagiarism, which is taking something i made and changinf it a tiny bit and then saying you made it – which would be a lie.
If you want to be creative, learn how to make something (it takes a long time) and go do it. Then you can own things and get credit and maybe even make money.
What right do you have to my labor? Just for enjoying it? Saying you have that right makes you no better than a parasite.
Go make your own.
“Me and my friends have been generating ‘IP’ collectively for twenty years.”
Like what? Twenty years is a long time.
“… We own all the copyrights. All the music, all the books, all the art, is not the property of ‘corrupt corporations’ it is owned by us.”
What music, books, and art?
“For some of it we have partnered with corporations and they have helped us make money off of it by investing capital, but we own all our copyrights – every note and every word.”
You can’t Copyright single musical notes or words in standard vocabulary.
“Me owning al lthis property in no way stops you from being creative and making your won stories and songs and records and paintings and films. It doesn’t stop you, on any country on earth – unless your idea of creativity is plagiarism, which is taking something i made and changinf it a tiny bit and then saying you made it – which would be a lie.”
What relevance does plagiarism have with the issue at hand?
“If you want to be creative, learn how to make something (it takes a long time) and go do it.”
Creativity is by principle an innate human nature, not something learned (although more wisdom would always help). Besides, your statement is an over-generalized affront, because people neither necessarily need additional knowledge in order to “make something”, nor need as much time to learn as you required.
“Then you can own things and get credit and maybe even make money.”
This statement definitely questions your sincerity in your entire comment.
“Own things”? Are you implying that people don’t already own anything?
“Get credit”? Isn’t that a natural consequence of creating or authoring?
Knowing you, your focus is mostly on money. That is, you used the word ‘even’ in post-position to ‘maybe’, as if you expect to earn some arbitrary minimum of money were you to decide to create something.
“What right do you have to my labor?”
Who claims rights to ‘labor’ now…?
“Just for enjoying it?”
Do you not expect anyone that buys your stuff to enjoy it?
Or are you suggesting that nobody is allowed to enjoy anything without paying for it? What folly.
“Saying you have that right makes you no better than a parasite.”
Nobody in the anti-Copyright side has either claimed or denied you of any of your rights. Your suggestion that they are makes you the “parasite”.
“Go make your own.”
If your work is as bad as your arguments, perhaps you are failing, simply because don’t have enough significance to your intended audience.
Now, your last post was a stupid attempt at an ad hominem. This one, however, is just a sad failure at an Ad Verecundiam.
Although I disagree with malcolm just as much as you do. Your post is “failing” just as much as his is.
If you can’t prove your point without copying and pasting every detail, then your post is not really worth reading.
Even though people should own their own intellectual property, they need to change with the times or dry up with the others that don’t.
“Your post is “failing” just as much as his is.”
Please…if my post is “failing” just as much as his is, why doesn’t he persist to support his points? Besides, I was regarding to his failure to deliver his work, not his failure to post a comment.
“If you can’t prove your point …”
What unproved point of mine are you referring to?
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“Twenty years is a long time.”; it is around ~1/4 of the average human life span.
“You can’t Copyright single musical notes or words in standard vocabulary.”; logically obvious.
“Creativity is by principle an innate human nature, not something learned.”; this is common knowledge among engineers.
“Besides, your statement is an over-generalized [...]“; this is an attack on his unsound generalization; self-explanatory.
“Knowing you, your focus is mostly on money.”; this is according to his own posts and responses for months now.
“[...] the word ‘even’ in post-position to ‘maybe’, [...]“; this one is quite intuitive for me, but quite cumbersome to explain; ‘maybe’ is synonymous to ‘possibly’, and ‘even’ in this context means “to a degree that extends”; but since outcomes are not random and people make expectations when deciding to do something, “maybe even make money” would be interpreted as “by giving it a chance, to some (arbitrary, minimum) extent, earn money”; now, this is not only at face value, but also implied by his writing and his past postings, which is what I implied by writing “Knowing you”.
“This statement definitely questions your sincerity [...].”; I analyzed his writing patterns more than enough to be able to detect when he writes with certainty and when he doesn’t, so I haunt him with it.
“Nobody in the anti-Copyright side has either claimed or denied you of any of your rights.”; logically obvious.
“Your suggestion that they are makes you the “parasite”.”; I quoted “parasite” to indicate his use of the word, in order to return his insult to him. This is a functional statement, not a point.
“If your work is as bad as your arguments, perhaps you are failing, simply because don’t have enough significance to your intended audience.”; this is not a point, but a hypothetical comparison between his failure to deliver his work to his intended audience, who are consumers in the entertainment perspective, to his failure to provide substance in his arguments.
My last paragraph is an observation, which is indisputable, and my questions are for him to challenge before I write superfluously.
—
His posts are always clusters of insubstantial arguments and so I always turn his own words against him. Many times I choose to ridicule him as well after I do what is needed.
“… without copying and pasting every detail, then your post is not really worth reading.”
Oh please. You wrote that while thinking that I neither inspect the statements that I quote nor try to reduce the size of the quotations.
“Even though people should own their own intellectual property, they need to change with the times or dry up with the others that don’t.”
At face value, that^ statement is a point that needs to be proven.
Go for it Canada! Some country with a semblance of balls needs to take on our “intellectual property” laws before all invention and creation is the property of corrupt corporations.
Think the American entertainment industry is still bitter that we sent them Celine Dion…
You know, I never thought about it that way before. XD
What do you plan to do, sue them? They didn’t do anything illegal by expressing their opinions (I mean, come on, they’re not even hateful), so you can’t touch them. And if you do, they can sue you right back.
Come on, America. You keep telling us to boycott your stuff if we don’t like the conditions that come with it; why don’t you boycott us by not sending stuff over here?