Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

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>The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

> And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

> And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.

> We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

I've been saying for a while now that Canada should respond to the tariffs by removing copyright protection for American IP in Canada and foster the creation of domestic streaming alternatives that compete with American streaming services while undercutting them on cost and offerings.

But let's be real here, Canada is a nation that outsources basic IT functionality to American companies wholesale, it can't really fight America in this domain as long as it is still dependent on Windows and Gmail.

> I've been saying for a while now that Canada should respond to the tariffs by removing copyright protection for American IP

Canadian here, I think copyright law fundamentally needs to go.

At the same time, you underestimate how bat-shit it would be to violate the Berne convention and the TRIPs agreement, even just directed at the U.S.

The only international consensus country which is not party to one of those is... Eritea? Even Russia and China are signatories who "officially" pay lip service to copyright law (even if they don't enforce other countries' IP in practice)

The U.S. is already talking about invading Canada, becoming the pirate bay for all U.S. IP would almost certainly be the push needed for the U.S. to make good on those threats.

While I agree that some copyright law probably goes too far, I don't understand how you could advocate for 0 copyright? What incentive will people have to produce creative works in that case?

This is an incredibly tired argument. Look at open source software - MIT/Apache license is of course relying on copyright but the incentive has nothing to do with the government granted monopoly that copyright brings.

The main beneficiaries are and always have been large companies with big portfolios of works, not actual people doing the work. And there are lots of business models for big companies that don’t require government making up and enforcing rights and still make profits. I don’t think we should to further and drop patents too which are exclusively used to limit competition and do nothing for innovation.

The same ones they have now where music labels and publishing houses take over the copyright for their works. Starving artists will sign away their copyright if it means money.

for American IP in Canada

I was born less than a mile from Canada, and I've gotta say: if the US invades Canada, I'm migrating.

An invasion of Canada might quickly devolve instead into an American civil war as a supermajority of citizens would oppose the utter batshit insanity of invading an ally. Particularly Canada.

We're already not too far off from a civil war. It won't take too much more to really kick that off

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