Here we go again. After the Globe and Mail, Tech Central station is letting the scoop out to the Slashdot crowd.
Regarding the issue of exporting the litigation spree to Canada, beyond the issue of private copying creating more non infringing practices, another point to keep in mind is the absence in Canadian copyright law of disproportionately high statutory penalties, coupled with a widespread aversion in the judiciary for the American school of civil damage awarding.
Meanwhile, I must say did my part protesting the current state of affairs by shamelessly using and abusing my rights to private copying this week-end. Which made me realize that using dual firewire buses is preferable to daisy chaining CD-writers, 52x is not enough, neither are dual processors, and that currently available backup technologies (short of DLTs and a mortgage) are totally ill equipped to deal with current hard drive sizes.
Update: Joho the Blog also discovered this. I’m amazed that this was not widely known, considering the outrages, notably on Slashdot, when the levy was adopted and subsequently raised.
From Tech Central story:
» RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. « Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on uploaders in the US. Filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US. »
Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music. If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every « supernode » in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand. »
Let’s see if I still know my math:
1- 17.3 million Canadian users x 50 % = 8.65 million broadband users in Canada
2- 173 million US users x 20 % = 34.6 million broadband users in the US.
Number of users are from: http://www.global-reach.biz/globstats/details.html
How are we to keep up with demand ????
This does not speak well of the research or factual basis of this story … what a shame !
Interesting numbers.
Just for fun, I checked using different sources: according to the ITU’s Birth of broadband numbers, broadband penetration in Canada was 11.1% in 2002. It was 6.9% in the US.
Considering respectives populations of 31 million (StatCan.gc.ca) and 285 million (census.gov), it gives us 3.4M users in Canada and 19.7M in the US.
I don’t know where they got their 50% number. I think 35% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Also, supernodes (in the LimeWire/BearShare/Kazaa etc. meaning) don’t actually share any files. They might be little Napsters, but hey don’t necessarly have any copywrited material under their control.
To top it off, offering files to the public KazaA-style is not, as far as I know, legal in Canada anymore than it is in the US.