News

Protest on C-32 Held in Calgary

A small protest on Bill C-32 was held in Calgary over the weekend. CTV and the Calgary Herald reported on the event.

8 Comments

  1. Hmm
    The CTV article is pretty disappointing. Limited in scope and the picture they decided to publish suggests these protesters really were one of Moore’s “radical extremists” (piracy reduces pollution? No one here is advocating piracy!)

  2. Negative publicity
    The “piracy party”??? At the risk of sounding conspiricist, did Moore put these guys up to it? It plays into his hands like a cheap comic book story. Nobody seriously following this issue wants to steal from the original owners!

  3. Mikkel Paulson says:

    The event was in fact organized by the Pirate Party of Canada, not by James Moore.

    https://www.pirateparty.ca/forum/index.php?topic=65.0

    Turnout was not as good as we had hoped, but at least it brought some attention to our concerns.

  4. @Mikkel
    Was the Pirate Party seriously brandishing signs as the one seen in the CTV article? I was under the impression they did not advocate piracy in the least!

  5. @…
    More likely it would be supporters of the pirate party who do advocate piracy and have latched on to the pirate party as the nearest to representing their views. The choice of name “pirate party” would seem to be an obvious attempt to attract support from citizens supporting piracy, even if their official policies do not.

  6. @crade
    Nonetheless the party representatives should perhaps have taken a look at the signs beforehand and approved/rejected some… Having the official policies that they do, I would not want people marching under my name advocating piracy (Granted their choice of party name wasn’t brilliant on that front)

    Unfortunately it seems this demonstration only served to further damage the reputation the Pirate Party has already established 🙁 Hopefully it won’t bleed off onto anyone else calling for fair copyright and net neutrality…

  7. Sure, the entertainment industry is wasteful, although I’m not sure how that equates to pirates being any greener, there are plenty of pirate CDs, VCDs and DVDs out there causing waste, and uninfringing downloads causing less waste as well of course.

    Of course he has a right to voice his opinion, and the pirate party has the right to encourage or discourage that opinion from being considered representative of their policies. Either way they will alienate some people who disagree I suppose.

  8. Jason Carr says:

    The global tv coverage is by far the best and likely was seen by the most people.

    http://www.globaltvcalgary.com/video/index.html (June 27 @ 5:57 minutes).

    Personally, and no offense to Geist but this country really needs to put some thought into this bill outside of Geist’s analysis. What I really wanted out of this rally was to highlight the other issues with the bill besides the digital locks. Yes the digital locks are an issue but where is the representation for the people who file-share?

    If we are radical extremists then so be it, I am not interested in were I fall on some arbitrary spectrum of copyright law. I am interested in preventing my lifestyle from becoming criminalized. I would love for the Pirate Party(though I do not speak for them on this) to distance themselves ideologically from Michael Geist. Sure he is the heavy hitter on the subject but, plain and simple, he does not support file sharing of copyrighted material.

    While I consider this rally a success due to the amount of brochures we got out, the global tv coverage and the support we got from people passing by in the streets. I am saddened that, once again, the digital lock issue was brought into the forefront. In a few months, the opposition parties are going to jump on Moore about the digital lock exceptions and Moore will concede. He will rewrite those parts of the bill, the nation will cheer and I, along with millions of other Canadians, will quietly lose the right to participate in an activity which has defined our creative consumption for the better part of a decade.

    I think that if the pirate party wants some ideological direction this is the niche we need to fill. File sharers are out there deserve to be represented. I met a lovely middle aged couple at the rally who politely discussed with me how file sharing has allowed them to enjoy Anime. They saw the flyers we had put up around the city(which talked exclusively of file sharing) and wanted to show their support. They didn’t do so out of some careless disregard for the livelihood of content creators. They did it because file sharing has enriched there lives, it has allowed them to discover something they would of otherwise never have thought to explore.

    File sharing is not stealing and it is not piracy (Oh yeah and it reduces Pollution).