Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites
canada.ca
canada.ca
"For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online"
Hrmph. Citation required.
Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:
* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.
* Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.
* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It's basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney's latest remake is.
Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.
Read the longer version rather than the press release: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html
d. clarify or strengthen rights holders' enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory "website-blocking" and "de-indexing" regime.
I keep saying this: I believe piracy is a valid counterweight mechanism to the capitalistic for-profit system that would milk society dry/fleece us year round until we die from the elements: charging us more than is reasonable so we'll so FU and pirate, or due to there being so much amazing content that you're competing for our time for entertainment because there's so much amazing entertainment to choose from?
Likewise I believe a UBI lever, where $xxx is allocated/earmarked monthly towards different types of creative/content work (to be defined/determined) will be how you fund the industry and artists (once they reach a level of competency commanding whatever level of pay); they can live off of their general UBI, developing their talents, their health/self-improvement/knowledge and skill development, or raise a family - in the meantime. And then we'll also have content produced that better mirrors the likes/needs/desires of society; Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars voucher policy, every eligible getting $100/year to contribute to the political candidate of their choice falls is a similar/same mechanism but for different system - to break apart the duopoly - along with Ranked Choice Voting would compound powerfully; he wants to do this for journalism - "Journalism Dollars" - essentially to combat the duopoly (to create more than 2 core narratives that gets pumped out) but also the mainstream media/media industrial complex in general.
Re: "Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint."
Jordan Peterson's Rule 1 of his latest book - "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" - goes into this necessary balance in very good detail - I'd recommend reading it; "DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT"
re UBI: you don't have to wait to see how 'well' would UBI work in practice - ask anyone from any European countries about their Roma population and how effectively they use the 'subsidies' (not the right word, but I can't recall the right one) from government. So many enterpreneurs and artists ... (/s just in case)
Like an addiction, prolonged poverty — and especially being born into poverty, and having your social circle consist mostly of other people born into poverty — changes many people for the worse, such that they become less able to effectively strategize to lift themselves out of poverty if they do get offered the resources to do so. They never learned how, and/or they have no role-models to mirror, so they don't even try.
UBI certainly isn't a magic fix for poverty. But I've never seen anyone claiming it to be. People in poverty are already usually receiving social assistance, so UBI wouldn't even change anything for them!
Instead, UBI is more likely to serve as a prophylactic to prevent poverty. It's a secure, predictable safety net that's just always there by default; a much-improved version of Unemployment, without stigma (because everyone gets it no matter what) and without restrictions (e.g. you get it even if you were previously self-employed. I mean, you get it even while you're employed, so of course you do.)
More like their landlord can live off their general UBI.
Abolish rent!
What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action. It's a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0].
I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it.
I'll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven't pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn't pirate a single movie- nobody I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I've been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I've caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15/month on Netflix, $12/month for Disney+, $10/month for Crave, $6/month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr/Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43/month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare).
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html
I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established.
Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?
Having more than one streaming service isn't a big problem, assuming they're priced reasonably. Going from one service with everything for $15 to ten services with a tenth of everything for $15 each isn't really that, but that's not the root of it.
Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through. If you actually subscribe to three different services, you want to turn on your TV and see everything available to you.
The companies in the best position to do this are the likes of Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft. Hollywood isn't too stupid to realize the dangers of that, but they're missing the obvious solution to it.
Publish a standard streaming API, so that anybody can make a streaming client, the same as anybody could make a VCR. Then the dominant consumer of the API won't be a big monopolistic corporation that will then be able to use its power against the movie producers, it will be a zillion different companies selling dirt cheap HDMI dongles with WiFi who each individually has no power at all. They'll all end up running whatever open source software somebody publishes to consolidate all the different services into one interface, which Hollywood could then improve themselves the same as any other open source project. It competitively atomizes a third party middle man that they don't want.
But it's basically the opposite of DRM. Security through clarity -- make everything open so nobody powerful can insert themselves between you and the viewer. Because big tech companies are more of a threat to them than The Pirate Bay. And they have to realize that before they're willing to do it.
I mostly agree with this. I know you're talking about a single streaming service, but just to expand your point, for me, my single interface is Roku. From it I can access Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Hulu, and a ton of others - all with the same remote on the same TV. One of my favorite permaculture Youtubers even has his own Roku app/channel. I've been looking into creating my own Roku app and the process doesn't seem overly burdensome. You need video content, an HLS or MPEG-DASH streaming webserver (I'll use nginx and HLS), some json, and maybe something minor I can't remember now.
But I like your idea of a standard streaming API. If it actually happened the resulting ecosystem would be awesome.
(*) Regional restrictions may apply
99% (thin air statistics irrelevant) of the people won't save a copy of your stream and share it unless there's a dedicated GUI for it. The remaining, well, pirates gonna pirate.
As you said in more detail, they are fighting totally the wrong battle. It feels like an even dumber version of the war on drugs.
Google's & Apple's TV interfaces do that now. Search for a show, it tells you which streaming apps have it, including a CTA to maybe buy / subscribe one you don't have. There is a recommended show stream on the front page for google that is service agnostic too.
Yes you still have to download and login to an app, but people are used to downloading and logging into an app for their phones already and it's only a 15 minute procedure every 5 years you buy a TV, if that.
It's funny to think that the platform, which is pretty easily replicable, is nearly as valuable as the content.
Why should the content creators hand over all over the margins to Netflix?
Amazon has the best compromise for this IMO. Users have a single account and payment method, and can subscribe to different "channels" from the Prime Video app itself. Content owners don't need to license stuff to Amazon, just pay them a cut of the add-on fee.
The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.
Even if it had needed to rely on DMCA-like concerns, over a hundred countries worldwide are party to the treaty which mandates a law addressing the scope of the DMCA, so enough other countries have such a law. (The details vary and not all such laws mandate a quick takedown of the allegedly infringing content.)
https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/ShowResults?start_year=...
With all of that said, Canada's legal analogue to the DMCA is a "notice and notice" regime, not a "notice and takedown" regime. The rights holder or their agent notifies the ISP, and the ISP notifies the user without necessarily taking down the content. A court order can be sought to force it offline, and I'd guess (but don't know) that some ISPs will voluntarily cooperate to some degree beyond the legal requirement.
DMCA is a country-specific thing. Moreover, it is specific to a country the article is not about.
In the GDPR's case, that's because every company wants to be able to have European customers.
But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc.
And sure, anyone could run a perfectly robust torrent tracker over Tor, that nobody could take down through DMCAing the DNS provider et al. But, without a large accessible market of people visiting to show ads, there'd be no economic incentive to do so — so nobody bothers.
The DMCA doesn't talk about who can be traded with, in general. It mainly places obligations on companies which host third-party content if they want to receive liability protections beyond what the law previously provided. The payment processors may not want to participate to avoid secondary copyright infringement liability, but that's entirely unrelated to the DMCA.
Similarly, the ad tech companies have their own separate reasons for not wanting to piss off the media companies, and the DMCA would not be triggered if the infringing content is not handled through those companies' services.
This is the soft power of the market at work. Short of refusing to create business presence or monetize, you'll never be able to get much of anything done.
If anything is to be done to force providers to raise the bar above a compelling, high quality piracy alternative, it quite literally has to be out of the goodness of contributor's hearts. Which means it must be so easy to build, people don't mind spending leisure time on it.
And assholes would still screw it up and ruin a good thing for everyone else. That won't ever change.
BitTorrent trackers are more alive and popular than ever, and you always get what's advertised thanks to relatively high quality moderation (if you visit the right places, of course, sites like TPB don't count)
Ubisoft embraced Denuvo for all PC product in 2017. Thereafter their PC sales revenue and PC's share of their total revenue has hit record levels.
The other factor is that with the rise of Crypto, PC torrents are now filled with miners and other malware.
The other factor is the largest games being online-only or having exclusive online functionality.
Digital distribution (Steam) is an aged and established concept now. What Steam provides is not and has never been unique - they just had the best exclusives (Valve games).
I've no idea if anything has changed in the last month, but here's what he wrote on the topic most recently: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2021/03/blocking-is-back/
Like what? I saw a comment[1] a few days ago saying something to this effect, but someone replied pointing out it was available, just not in a manner that OP was satisfied with. FWIW I checked a hulu original that I recently watched, and it was available in canada under disney+.
> The Government of Canada Launches Consultation on a Modern Copyright Framework for Online Intermediaries
to
> Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites
?
In Canada, our freedom of expression is limited by whatever the Government deems appropriate:
> Freedom of expression in Canada is protected as a "fundamental freedom" by Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter also permits the government to enforce "reasonable" limits.
Unfortunately, there is not much guidelines these days on what "reasonable" is considered. I like to hope it would not be abused...
Is hyperbole constructive?
If we continue to teach good civics and encourage people promise no safe votes to politicians, they won't make reasonable limits unreasonable.
The same could be said for the United States or really just about any other country, as there are restrictions on free speech here (think "fighting words," etc.)
Piracy as a reason is a complete lie.
This is about far more about political censorship in Canada. This is about censoring the media and free speech.
The current government has extensive experience at censoring their political opponents. They are quite public about 'accreditation' of the media and 'licensing' the news.
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2019/01/bell-urged-canadian-gove...
The media companies would also have way less natural piracy to deal with in the first place and the government would have to spend less money on the illegal behavior that is left.
They could even go beyond and make media company adhoc enforcement of those laws illegal (ex no torrent user scarelettering)
Federal government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites
https://mobilesyrup.com/2021/04/14/federal-government-propos...
https://torrentfreak.com/canada-proposes-new-regime-to-block...
The worrying part is bundling canadian content rules along intermediary access to potentially copyright infringing material. That part is peculiar, seeing as theyre totally separate concepts. Hopefully its not just a way of suggesting defending disneys copyright on 100 year old cartoons is equal to having 25% of the song played on FM radio be “canadian”
Movies and Music is a billion dollar profits industry, just look at how much Marvel and Disney made from Avengers and Star Wars. Why not simply make content that people want to consume?
Not that the Canadian government is at all above engaging in egregious crony capitalism. They are all for throwing cash at legacy newspapers.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/in-canada-a-government-pro...
The current government (Liberals) have shut down parliament, during covid, only to prevent investigations into their WE charity corruption.
When a 3rd party candidate Maxime Bernier attempted his own party ... the media by law had to give him equal air time, but his reach was censored (ex: they set his youtube videos to unlisted).
The "Rebel Media" a right wing news org was prevented from entering a federal debate. They had to get an 11th hour injunction to be let in, and even after, the Liberal leader (Trudeau) refused to answer any questions.
This will be used to silence political dissidence, and "hate speech" law violators.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/02/03/liberals...
> Asked if the government would block foreign websites like Breitbart News, the New York Times ... if they failed to comply ... Guilbeault said no one has said sites should be blocked in Canada but he added, “Frankly, I’m not sure I see what the big deal is.”
These are the people you're dealing with, they don't see any issue with this type of censorship. Authoritarian regimes don't happen at once, they grow over time.
Such admiration for a warlord dictator who didn't hesitate to kill his political opponents, seize their properties, and much worse [1] sure should make citizens uneasy up there.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/world/justin-trudeau-castro-e...
[1] https://www.therichest.com/shocking/the-15-worst-atrocities-...
And harder yet is to define piracy itself - Should the Canadian government be protecting copyright not under its purview? How about US copyright? Or European? What about Chinese copyright? Will the Canadian government protect from corporate pirates that pirate the Linux kernel for use in hardware where they do not release source under GPL terms? (Likely not)
And all of their blocking measures cannot stop at "Stop piracy". We see what happens in schools - all blocking engines ALSO have to block VPN, Proxy, Tor, and "proxy avoidance" to even approach effectiveness... And those also are easy to bypass.
Usually, what these kinds of laws are for are as a "feel good", and for shoveling money to someone's pet company for a lackluster "blocking" solution.
Do tell, why is it an evil country and why is it embarrassing?
And it gets worse every year - right now it's a real problem to find a pediatrician or a family doctor in my area.
I don't understand why Canadians are so obsessed with it and bring it up every time what someone dares to criticize their country.
> I don’t know anyone who would rather live in America
Hey, you do live in America :-)
I'm sorry your family hasn't gotten the care it deserves, but would you rather end up with a 100,000 bill, or your child dead because they didn't have insurance and couldn't afford their insulin?
I don't have to think about it, i just go and use it. Yes it could be better but would you want to pay more taxes to fund it better? (i know is sure would)