On the heals of Jim Prentice echoing sentiments of major record labels (video, via Michael Geist) during a question and answer period, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters have stated that they are against a Canadian DMCA.


The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) President Glenn O'Farrell wrote an op-ed in the Hill Times (Paywall) stating that the radio broadcasters is on the "breaking point", saying that tariff's could grow to $200 million a year if DMCA-like copyright laws were tabled.

Michael Geist highlighted the following:

If a new fee proposed by the record labels is approved, additional payments from Canadian broadcasters to the labels - many based outside Canada - are expected to total approximately $50 million per year. In claiming this fee, these labels are looking to take advantage of a provision in Canada's Copyright Act to compensate themselves for losses they say they have incurred via Internet downloading. Rather than adapting their business models to the opportunities presented by evolving digital media, the labels are engaging in what is essentially an abuse of the principles of the Copyright Act.



"With the powerful Canadian broadcasting community speaking out against Prentice's plans," Geist says, "the list of opponents and concerned parties gets longer every week as it now includes consumers, education groups, retailers such as Best Buy, telecommunications companies such as Telus, musician groups, artists groups, privacy groups, and more than 40,000 Canadians on the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group."

An interesting conversation also ensued:

"If they really want to put the kibosh on illegal filesharing, they ought to make it impractical for residential internet access subscribers to run any sort of service of any kind on their computers by blocking absolutely *all* incoming connection requests," an anonymous commenter suggests, "as well as any incoming UDP packets that weren't responses to a previous outgoing request."

"Blocking filesharing is a silly, prohibition-esque approach that will royally screw legitimate filesharers and simply cause the black market to find an alternate means." Trails, another commenter said. The user added, "Your claim that it will not affect 80% of users is not valid; the home user's internet connection is used for increasingly advanced and diverse purposes. Blocking all incoming connection requests? Your view of internet usage is overly-simplistic to say the least if you think this is will affect only 20% of users. What if I wanted to host a game of Half Life? Or a person starting up a home business wanted to host a net meeting?"

"How much data is too much data? At what point do your bandwidth needs and patterns clearly identify you as a miscreant?" user Patrick asks, "What if you have six machines lending processor time to legitimate efforts like SETI signals analysis? Or what if you post your own, popular works online for public download? What if you are legitimately sharing large files (research doc's, etc.)? Should these people be punished by such a short-sighted plan?"

"Please note that while this was a lecture focusing on policy making in the context of climate change, that 5 of the 8 questions focused on copyright." Russell McOrmond noted, "Politicians and heads of lobby groups (industry associations, unions, etc) really need to modernize their thinking in these areas, or they will be "voted out" of whatever type of office or executive positions they hold."
Lease Reviewed by Lease on . [13/2/08]Broadcasters Reject Canadian DMCA On the heals of Jim Prentice echoing sentiments of major record labels (video, via Michael Geist) during a question and answer period, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters have stated that they are against a Canadian DMCA. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) President Glenn O'Farrell wrote an op-ed in the Hill Times (Paywall) stating that the radio broadcasters is on the "breaking point", saying that tariff's could grow to $200 million a year if DMCA-like copyright laws were Rating: 5