Fwd: Please Stand Against the New Copyright Bill

[JoeHill]

Mr Chris Aitken wrote: 

> Colin McGregor wrote:
> > FYI:
> >
> > Here is the e-mail I received from my MP re: Bill 61. Sigh... not
> > exactly against the bill, but not exactly for it either...
> >     
> 
> This is probably going to piss off a lot of people, but I'm not (only) 
> trying to be the devil's advocate here, so I'm going to ask anyway:
> 
> Isn't all this about us wanting something for nothing? I mean isn't 
> someone spending emotion, time, and money creating, developing and 
> distributing something that we want it for nothing. And, yeah, I know a 
> lot of what we're talking about is degrees. I mean when a single mother 
> is fined thousands of dollars for downloading a few songs for her kid it 
> seems extreme. Nevertheless, are we not still talking about someone 
> wanting something for nothing?

This isn't it at all, not even remotely. The opposition to this bill has
absolutely nothing to do with downloading free music.

This is about an assault on fair use, enabling publishers to sue librarians or
reviewers who they disagree with, enabling content distributors to
charge us per device instead of per song or per album, eventually leading to,
in my estimation, a situation where media companies can charge us every time we
_view_ or _listen to_ a piece of media.

One respondent to this thread pointed out that in fact this bill will have very
very severe ramifications for open source software, since OSS tends to just
ignore idiotic attempts at DRM, and anything that does not respect DRM will be
illegal under this bill.

This copyright bill is in no way aimed at protecting artists like yourself. It
is aimed at granting the content _distributors_ all the power and all of the
dough. 

-- 
JoeHill
++++++++++++++++++++
 Leela: Bender's flying too low! And he's upside-down! 
 Protestor: He must be talking on a cell-phone.
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