Quote:
Originally Posted by kevman
With a second straight minority government no party will want to be the party that force ANOTHER election... Why wouldn't the Libs or NDP go for it? All things considered (economy, environment, Afghanistan, health care, etc.) Bill C-61 is peanuts and is of little relative importance!
Do you really save THAT much money by downloading music? I've got about 10-15gb's of mp3's in my iTunes, most of which is purchased. My roomate has 100+gb's of music, most of which is garbage and even more of it does not even have a single listen. Do you really need that much music? With services like Pandora and Last.fm one can very easily find new music these days and with .mp3 purchases it is easy to buy singles if the rest of the albums are terrible. I think it's in the artists best interest to make songs available for free download but don't alot of artists already do this? Bill C-61 does not prohibit this does it?
Kermitology, if I wanted to download your free album I'd still be able to under C-61 correct?
Maybe I'm out of touch but I really don't see the big problem with the bill...
All other political partisanship aside I think one would be naive to change their vote based on this bill and ignore the other issues currently facing us!
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My opposition to C-61 has nothing to do with pirating music. It's about my right to format-shift or time-shift as I see fit with content that I've legally purchased. If I pay for DRM-protected songs on the iTunes store and want to stream them over my wireless network to my PS3 or Xbox 360, the only way I can do that is by cracking the DRM and converting Apple's files to mp3 format. If C-61 became law, that would make me a criminal subject to a $20,000 fine.
Likewise, if I purchase a DRM-protected CD but want to rip the songs to iTunes so I can upload them to my iPod, the only way that is possible is by cracking the DRM, which would again result in me becoming a copyright criminal subject to a $20,000 fine.
For another example, consider the following: last weekend my father called me looking for tech support. He had won five free song downloads from a contest promotion at Subway. He was able to download the songs, but he couldn't copy them to his iPod and wanted my help. Since the songs didn't come from the iTunes store, they were using a DRM format that isn't supported by Apple; thus they weren't compatible with his iPod. I walked him through the process of cracking the DRM, but I also explained to him that if C-61 (which he had never heard of and wasn't familiar with the issue) were passed, doing what we just did could result in him being fined $20,000.