Thursday, June 9, 2005
DCMA-Like Law Coming Soon to a Canada Near You
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 03:00 PM
"The federal government will introduce new legislation aimed at toughening up copyright laws in the digital world, CTV News has learned. Still, industry stakeholders who say file sharing is stealing say the laws are not stringent enough. About seven million Canadians download music from the Internet and the Canadian market for music downloads is estimated to be $100 million, according to The Canadian Independent Record Production Association...The new legislation will contain rules that will make it illegal to hack or break into the digital locks often used to prevent the copying of movies and software -- although it will remain perfectly legal in Canada to copy a CD for personal use."
Well, great. :evil: I'm not all that surprised though - it was only a matter of time until the music and movie industries got around to the 30 million of us north of their home base. The scary part here is that while it might be legal to copy a CD for personal use, breaking any sort of encryption will not be legal. So that means if the music companies switch to CDs that have even the simplest encryption on them, breaking that encryption is illegal, even if you're just ripping a CD to your hard drive. Here's the worst-case scenario I can think of: the music labels come up with a really simple form of encryption, something that doesn't interfere with normal playback of the CD on regular CD players, and something that even the most basic CD ripper can bypass.
The ugly part? If Windows Media Player were capable of bypassing that simple encryption, they could argue that it was a violation of this law, and have that product pulled from the market in the same way that the DVD rippers were pulled from stores shelves in the USA last year. You'd end up with mainstream music players that couldn't rip CDs, and we'll be downloading rippers from a server in Bermuda or something. :roll:
Well, great. :evil: I'm not all that surprised though - it was only a matter of time until the music and movie industries got around to the 30 million of us north of their home base. The scary part here is that while it might be legal to copy a CD for personal use, breaking any sort of encryption will not be legal. So that means if the music companies switch to CDs that have even the simplest encryption on them, breaking that encryption is illegal, even if you're just ripping a CD to your hard drive. Here's the worst-case scenario I can think of: the music labels come up with a really simple form of encryption, something that doesn't interfere with normal playback of the CD on regular CD players, and something that even the most basic CD ripper can bypass.
The ugly part? If Windows Media Player were capable of bypassing that simple encryption, they could argue that it was a violation of this law, and have that product pulled from the market in the same way that the DVD rippers were pulled from stores shelves in the USA last year. You'd end up with mainstream music players that couldn't rip CDs, and we'll be downloading rippers from a server in Bermuda or something. :roll:
