Owning an iPod doesn't make you a criminal

This is the gist of a ruling that struck down a new levy that was to be charged on MP3 players and other types of digital storage. These sorts of policies seem to derive from the perceptions of the recording industry and its fellow travelers that its customers are essentially a band of thieves. This sort of behaviour leads even those of us who really aren't downloading to wish for the ultimate demise of the majors so that they may be replaced by some kind of direct artist-to-consumer online distribution model. Maybe that's utopian, but given how the major players in the recording industry treat us consumers, I think it would be a nice bit of karmic justice.

More Stupidity From The Recording Industry

Now in the US the RIAA is saying that you can't even make an MP3 from a CD that you legally own! This is insanity! Does the recording industry really really think that we should buy a CD and pay for a legal download of the same song for our own personal use.

Bullshit.

I think it's time to start calling out these characters because I suspect that none of them do these sorts of stupid things themselves. Let's take Terry Corcoran for example, he's clearly in favour of these kinds of stupid laws with no fair-use provisions. Does Terry Corcoran have any music on his computer that he ripped from legally purchased CDs? Does any member of his family have anything of this sort?

I highly doubt at this stage that there are very many computer users who have not backed up at least some of their music collection onto their hard drives. Pundits who support these draconian laws, politicians who enact them, lawyers who file suits based on them - I suspect that most of these people have intellectual property that somehow falls outside the extremely narrow provisions of the music industry.

Criminalizing iPods

The Conservatives are set to unveil some kind of new copyright law that caters to the insane, vaguely suicidal music industry lobby. You can reasonably expect some kind of levy on, say, Mp3 players among other things. Saskboy has the goods on why this is a terrible idea. Of course I'd expect the Cons to yield to an asshole-filled corporate lobby group, but Saskboy raises this point to:

"Note the Liberal’s Minister partly responsible for the Copyright Act was also in the pocket of the CRIA, as was past minister Bev Oda."

That doesn't exactly fill me with hope. I know that there is a very Bay St.-oriented blue-grit wing of the Liberals that might well support this kind of let-the-business-lobby-write-the-law approach. What I want to see is how the opposition handles this law, and particularly what kind of Liberal party Dion is running. If you bend to the recording industry, why not the energy sector on climate change? I don't think it's too big of a leap from this comparatively venal (though important to music fans) law to something like emissions. Will they go for a US-style lawsuit-heavy industry-kowtowing law or will they vote against it? This is the kind of vote that separates the real progressives from the poseurs.