Why Pander to Hollywood?
The Government appears to be on track to strengthen Canada’s copyright laws. While I understand the impulse – Conservatives are, after all, naturally disposed towards law and order – I believe that doing so would blow a historic opportunity for the Tories to scoop up the youth vote. Moreover, in failing to thoroughly overhaul the laws which govern Canada’s cultural and communications industries, the government is missing a chance to simultaneously strike a powerful blow against its opponents and to improve the lives of ordinary Canadians.
Now, obviously, it would probably be a bad thing (and counter-productive) if the government simply went and threw out all copyright laws. After all, they protect all sorts of trade secrets and, without them, we would soon find ourselves with the same sort of anarchist intellectual property climate as China, where car companies unveil their new models at tradeshows only to find that they have already been reverse-engineered and copies by their competitors. However, a loosening of present copyright laws (in reality, a legalization of the existing situation) would deal almost exclusively with the entertainment industry. Time-shifting, personal use, and so forth exemptions, if codified into law, would simply formalize what already happens in Canada and prevent the sort of abusive lawsuits against individuals filed by the RIAA in the United States.
Such a move wouldn’t change any facts on the ground in this country – but it would do two very useful things. First, it would give the government an achievement which it could sell to young people. For all that they profess to care about the environment, peace, and blah, blah, blah, avoiding RIAA lawsuits against themselves is an issue which might actually motivate people in their teens and twenties to show up at the polls. Second, it would piss off Hollywood and, so far as I know, no government has ever lost votes by picking a fight with vapid, preening, and stupid Tinseltown gasbags.
Trying to stop file-sharing is futile anyways. Middle-aged women in my office swap television shows burned to DVD’s. My former roommates have several terabytes of Japanese anime and other crap (once, over drinks, we tried to estimate the potential bill if the RIAA were ever able to sue them under U.S. Copyright law and finally gave up after concluding that it would run into either the hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars).
In any case, massive file sharing is largely a transitory matter – a temporary stage whose existence will encourage a lazy industry to produce things people actually want to pay for and to deliver them to individuals in a convenient way. Personally, I buy most of my own music through Apple’s iTunes because, at $.99 a song, the price is fair and, more to the point, I am able to buy from my own music player (and from my iPhone) without any of the hassles which historically accompanied other forms of music acquisition.
In other words, to the degree such a move would hurt anyone, it would mostly hurt people we don’t like (and who don’t like us) and would be a momentary affair which would actually encourage innovation and better service in the long-term.
Indeed, a plan to liberalize Canada’s copyright laws could be packaged as part of a broader “Digital Agenda” which, like the above proposal, would improve the services received by Canadians while wounding people who, for the most part, are opposed to the government anyways.
At the core of any future-oriented technology agenda for Canada would be the thorough reform of the CRTC into an organization with a much-narrower mandate resembling that of the Federal Communications Commission in the United States. The cultural protection racket ghettoizes and cripples good Canadian cultural output (like, for example, the brilliant Slings & Arrows) while forcing taxpayers to subsidize crap. At the same time, limits on foreign ownership in the cultural and communications industries allow, to pick one entirely random example, mobile phone providers to continue to set their rates by the same code of gentlemanly conduct which governs inter-inmate relations in prison showers.
It’s absurd that I’m not able to subscribe to HBO, Showtime, FX, and the rest and am instead forced to pay for bastardized Canadian versions of the same and, in some cases, to wait months for episodes to air in this country. It is insane that I had to drive one hundred miles into another country to buy an iPhone, and then to carefully modify its software in order to be able to use half of its features. It is beyond ludicrous that the DISH Network satellite installed by one of my friends is, literally, criminal. All of these injustices are a product of a deeply flawed cultural policy which ought to be flushed down the crapper of history.
In this way – admittedly a small way – the government could continue to demonstrate to Canadians that there is a real alternative to the sort of dime-store totalitarianism to which we’ve been subjected to for so many years.
Now, obviously, it would probably be a bad thing (and counter-productive) if the government simply went and threw out all copyright laws. After all, they protect all sorts of trade secrets and, without them, we would soon find ourselves with the same sort of anarchist intellectual property climate as China, where car companies unveil their new models at tradeshows only to find that they have already been reverse-engineered and copies by their competitors. However, a loosening of present copyright laws (in reality, a legalization of the existing situation) would deal almost exclusively with the entertainment industry. Time-shifting, personal use, and so forth exemptions, if codified into law, would simply formalize what already happens in Canada and prevent the sort of abusive lawsuits against individuals filed by the RIAA in the United States.
Such a move wouldn’t change any facts on the ground in this country – but it would do two very useful things. First, it would give the government an achievement which it could sell to young people. For all that they profess to care about the environment, peace, and blah, blah, blah, avoiding RIAA lawsuits against themselves is an issue which might actually motivate people in their teens and twenties to show up at the polls. Second, it would piss off Hollywood and, so far as I know, no government has ever lost votes by picking a fight with vapid, preening, and stupid Tinseltown gasbags.
Trying to stop file-sharing is futile anyways. Middle-aged women in my office swap television shows burned to DVD’s. My former roommates have several terabytes of Japanese anime and other crap (once, over drinks, we tried to estimate the potential bill if the RIAA were ever able to sue them under U.S. Copyright law and finally gave up after concluding that it would run into either the hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars).
In any case, massive file sharing is largely a transitory matter – a temporary stage whose existence will encourage a lazy industry to produce things people actually want to pay for and to deliver them to individuals in a convenient way. Personally, I buy most of my own music through Apple’s iTunes because, at $.99 a song, the price is fair and, more to the point, I am able to buy from my own music player (and from my iPhone) without any of the hassles which historically accompanied other forms of music acquisition.
In other words, to the degree such a move would hurt anyone, it would mostly hurt people we don’t like (and who don’t like us) and would be a momentary affair which would actually encourage innovation and better service in the long-term.
Indeed, a plan to liberalize Canada’s copyright laws could be packaged as part of a broader “Digital Agenda” which, like the above proposal, would improve the services received by Canadians while wounding people who, for the most part, are opposed to the government anyways.
At the core of any future-oriented technology agenda for Canada would be the thorough reform of the CRTC into an organization with a much-narrower mandate resembling that of the Federal Communications Commission in the United States. The cultural protection racket ghettoizes and cripples good Canadian cultural output (like, for example, the brilliant Slings & Arrows) while forcing taxpayers to subsidize crap. At the same time, limits on foreign ownership in the cultural and communications industries allow, to pick one entirely random example, mobile phone providers to continue to set their rates by the same code of gentlemanly conduct which governs inter-inmate relations in prison showers.
It’s absurd that I’m not able to subscribe to HBO, Showtime, FX, and the rest and am instead forced to pay for bastardized Canadian versions of the same and, in some cases, to wait months for episodes to air in this country. It is insane that I had to drive one hundred miles into another country to buy an iPhone, and then to carefully modify its software in order to be able to use half of its features. It is beyond ludicrous that the DISH Network satellite installed by one of my friends is, literally, criminal. All of these injustices are a product of a deeply flawed cultural policy which ought to be flushed down the crapper of history.
In this way – admittedly a small way – the government could continue to demonstrate to Canadians that there is a real alternative to the sort of dime-store totalitarianism to which we’ve been subjected to for so many years.
posted by Adam Yoshida at
12:35 AM
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