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Vanity Fair on the Pirate Bay

Interesting piece in the magazine's annual Hollywood issue.

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February 14, 2007 Comments are Disabled News

Justice Minister Rejects Call for Camcording Law

The National Post reports that Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has no plans to prioritize a new camcording law, despite the intense lobbying of recent weeks.  Nicholson noted "that there is already a stiff copyright law in Canada to catch people who sneak camcorders into movie theatres for the purposes of […]

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February 13, 2007 14 comments News

Corporations Turn to P2P

The WSJ reports that companies such as GM, Coca-Cola Co. and videogame publisher Tulga Games Inc. are now using peer-to-peer technology to transmit large chunks of data like video files or software updates, to employees and customers. Instead of a costly expansion of its satellite network last year, GM turned […]

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February 13, 2007 Comments are Disabled News

CPCC Goes For Broke, Part Two

While the substantive shortcomings of the latest attempt to add a levy to the Apple iPod and SD cards are important (not to mention legal questions of res judicata and political questions surrounding the Conservatives policy commitment to eliminate the levy), there is a bigger story at work.  Ten years ago, the music industry's vision of what the market would look like today focused on two things – DRM and the private copying levy.  DRM formed the key provisions in the WIPO Internet Treaties that were concluded in 1996, while CRIA celebrated the culmination of a 15 year lobbying effort to create a levy on blank media in 1997.

Fast forward to 2007 and it is clear that the industry got it completely wrong.  DRM faces a consumer and regulatory backlash, with a growing number of leading digital music vendors – Yahoo, Real, and Apple – all calling on the industry to drop the restrictions.  They are joined by independent labels who are successfully promoting their music through eMusic, the number two online music seller, and by the artists themselves.  With the rumours of EMI dropping DRM, it looks like it is only a matter of time before the DRM-focused strategy is abandoned.

The private copying levy has gone through similar challenges.  The levy has succeeded in generating an enormous amount of income (over $150 million), yet some believe it has become a roadblock to WIPO ratification (national treatment concerns associated with the levy), it is far more market distorting that its advocates anticipated, and much to CRIA's dismay, it has provided peer-to-peer file sharers with a legitimate argument that downloading for personal, non-commercial purposes is lawful in Canada. 

At the same time, the emerging view worldwide is that some of the copying it compensates – device shifting from CDs to iPods – should not be compensated.  For example:

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February 12, 2007 6 comments News

Yet Another Camcorder Claim

The Globe and Mail runs an interview with Ellis Jacob, the CEO of Cineplex Entertainment.  He discusses camcording and in the process changes the claim yet again – after the industry claimed that 50 and 40 percent of camcorded films can be traced to Canada (while telling the U.S. government […]

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February 12, 2007 7 comments News