The Buymusic.ca Blog

Teksavvy has stated in a recent blog entry that they have received a request for information in regards to 2000 IP addresses.

According to this blog entry, Voltage Pictures LLC intends to file a lawsuit on December 17th, 2012 in order to gain this information from the Chatham, Ontario based internet provider. And many members of the media have speculated that this is related to the illegal downloading of “The Hurt Locker“, an 2008 action film featuring Jeremy Renner and Guy Pearce.

The company claims that it intends to fight for their customer’s privacy. Click here to access the legal documents on this case.

Protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement are under way in Europe.

Like the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act legislation in the United States, this international trade agreement contains many questionable regulations in regards to the enforcement of intellectual property laws on the internet.

Furthermore, Section 5 (Paragraph 6) of this agreement explicitly forbids the circumvention of copy protection regardless of the private copying exemptions that our government may enable in the future :

6. In order to provide the adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies referred to in paragraph 5, each Party shall provide protection at least against:

(a) to the extent provided by its law:

(i) the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure carried out knowingly or with reasonable grounds to know; and

(ii) the offering to the public by marketing of a device or product, including computer programs, or a service, as a means of circumventing an effective technological measure; and

(b) the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a device or product, including computer programs, or provision of a service that:

(i) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing an effective technological measure; or

(ii) has only a limited commercially significant purpose other than circumventing an effective technological measure.

Region coded DVDs and Blu-Rays are copy protected so this clause criminalizes the copying of these DVDs and Blu-Rays to other devices.

It also criminalizes the distribution of devices that have been altered to play material from outside of a person’s region and software that can be used to bypass copy protection on music and film.

Unfortunately, Bill C-11‘s technological protection measures provisions were written to be compatible with this agreement, prior to any consultation with the public. And the current government in Canada insists on keeping this provision in when public consultations for Bill C-32 have resulted in overwhelming opposition and concern to this provision and others.

Private copying has been part of our Copyright Act since 1997. We have been able to copy music for private use, as defined by Section 80 of our copyright act since then. But apparently the current government believes it is impossible to grant an ability to copy material that is copy protected for private use, even when the current limitations stipulated in our copyright act could suffice.

According to these limitations material that is copied for private use cannot be sold or rented out, “or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental”. It cannot be distributed, “whether or not for the purpose of trade”, nor communicated “to the public by telecommunication”, nor performed or “caused to be performed in public”.

Private copying clearly does NOT enable internet piracy or the illicit trade of counterfeit DVDs and Blu-Rays, so I see no reason as to why the current government insists on adding a specific provision to our Copyright Act to disallow the circumvention of technological protection measures for the reproduction of material for private purposes.

To listen to or view copy protected material a consumer must use software that decrypts and copies the resulting copy to memory or a hard drive for playback. And though temporary the resulting file is a copy from which copy protection was circumvented by a software program or device.

If an exemption for private copying were allowed, the recipient would be the same and the circumvention would be the same. The resulting copy would again be copied to a device or memory for playback, with very strict limitations in regards to distribution.

ACTA and Bill C-11 proposes the criminalization of software and devices using this premise that these can be used for illegal purposes when in reality any software or device used to decrypt copy protected CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs can be used for illegal purposes.

In the case of telecommunications, anyone can stream music and film from legally purchased devices to the net. They can also play music or films in public without paying the necessary license fees using any DVD or Blu-Ray player.

In essence it pushes both presumptions of guilt in regards to the Canadian consumer and prejudice in regards to the manufacturers of DVD and Blu-Ray decrypting software. And regardless of the idiotic rhetoric, many individuals and associations are concerned about the precedents these set.

It is important as a Canadian consumer that you voice your concerns in regards to ACTA and Bill C-11 to your local Member of Parliament as soon as possible. The public need to make it clear that they will not stand for unbalanced copyright reform in Canada.

The Recording Industry Association of America issued a statement about Megaupload yesterday on their blog.

According to this statement, they believe that this raid will result in more traffic towards the legal services :

“According to the NPD Group, Limewire users left by the millions in the months after the shutdown… Digital music sales that had been flagging jumped in the month immediately after the Limewire shutdown, and have remained stronger ever since… When Billboard looked at the data after the Limewire shutdown it said “The spike in sales was immediate, noticeable and lasting.”

Unfortunately this raid has resulted in concerns about legitimate services being removed from the net because of the actions of the service’s users according to Threatpost.com security blogger Dennis Fisher.

“I know that they’re saying that apparently this bill would somehow infringe on free speech. I didn’t read the bill. I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody who has even read the bill could predict that. But it seems like it might be a red herring because people just want to steal. Because they can. You know, I call it Caucasian looting. And just because you’re sitting at your computer in your pajama bottoms doesn’t mean doesn’t mean you’re not stealing” – Bill Maher on January 20th, 2012 episode of “Real Time”

Apparently he thinks everyone that opposed this law wants “free sh*t”, even after having admitted he hasn’t read the bill.

Dismissive, knee jerk generalizations in no way address the concerns brought forward by the NetCoalition, Consumers Federation Of America and ACLU.

I guess he didn’t bother to read their statement either.

Megaupload, the Hong Kong based file sharing service, has had their Ashburn, Virginia servers shut down by Federal authorities in the United States. And four employees of this company have been arrested in New Zealand.

An indictment filed Thursday accuses the company of having cost copyright holders $500 Million in lost revenue for having facilitated the illegal distribution of music, film and other copyrighted content. But the company claimed these allegations were “grotesquely overblown” prior to the shut down, according to USA Today.

Unfortunately Megaupload also had legitimate users, whose files are inaccessible now. The site had 150 million registered users and had 50 million hits per day.

I had used the service years back to send my own videos to fellow Youtubers, which was more convenient than sending it by email. I have since found other services but it’s still a shame to loose such a resource.

Americans can click here to write a letter to Congress about PIPA and SOPA. Canadians can also direct their American friends and relatives to the site at http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa.

Though American both the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act allow American special interest groups to impose their interpretations of United States copyright law on foreign nationals and foreign businesses located outside of the United States.

As Canadians we should be concerned because we have different laws in regards to Copyright and we’re in the middle of reforming our copyright act.

Works are made available to Canadians in the public domain two decades before these same works are made available to Americans and Europeans so if I were to publish Ernest Hemingway‘s works on this site, for example, I could be subjected to litigation by his American publishers.

Though legal to publish in Canada, his works could have my site removed from the American search engines and cause my site to loose affiliations and funding from American companies and individual American donators. And it doesn’t appear to matter that my site is hosted in Canada because the American copyright lobby have laid claim to the .com domain in the TVShack case.

When British citizens are subjected to extradition over linking to copyrighted material, a legal act within the United Kingdom, it is obvious that restraint would not happen after the passing of this legislation. And I have in the past inadvertently linked copyrighted material.

I have had requests for links that sounded legitimate but were not. And nothing stops an illegitimate profiteer from buying a legitimate site or domain that I’ve linked in the past, without my knowledge.

I do my best to clean up my listings. But people could also spam this site, an illegal act in Canada, yet I could still be subjected to the SOPA condoned retribution. The legislation is that dangerously vague.

Yes, there are sites in Russia and China that blatantly violate copyright but SOPA is a slippery slope.

MSNBC blogger Bob Sullivan reports that Wikipedia has joined tomorrow’s SOPA Blackout.

Numerous sites have already confirmed their participation in this protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act as concerns mount with the extradition of TVShack co-creator Richard O’Dweyer to the United States.

Several American sites have decided to go dark on January 18th to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, a controversial piece of legislation that has been introduced into the House Of Representatives in the United States.

Reddit, Red 5 Studios, the Chezburger sites, Major League Gaming, Sonicretro, Gog.com, Minecraft/Mojang.com, xda-developers.com, Platform Nation, Dark Legacy Comic and TuCows (my registrar) are the first to confirm their participation. And this list of sites will likely expand as more confirmed opponents decide to participate.

Click here to read a joint statement against SOPA from AOL Inc., eBay Inc., Facebook Inc., Google Inc., LinkedIn Corporation, Mozilla Corp., Twitter, Inc.,Yahoo! Inc. and Zynga Game Network.

A new year is about to begin and protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act are being organized.

Amazon.com has joined with Google, eBay, Paypal, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Bloomberg and numerous other companies and individuals in founding NetCoalition, an organization dedicated to opposing SOPA. And there have been numerous media accounts about the possibility of self imposed black-outs by NetCoalition members.

According to Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales, a similar protest by the Italian version of Wikipedia had been successful in thwarting an Italian law that would have limited editorial independence. But it appears that this protest may be limited according to Wales :

“My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case. There are obviously many questions about whether the strike should be geotargeted (U.S.-only), etc.”

If these protests are geotargeted Canadians will be able to access the sites, as usual. But Wales claims that a blackout of the English version of Wikipedia is being considered :

“One possible view is that because the law would seriously impact the functioning of Wikipedia for everyone, a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government.”

The date of this protest has yet been published but several media outlets and blogs speculate that it may be scheduled for the 24th of January, when the United States Senate vote on the Protect IP Act.