Well I came across this article If the Globe and Mail today. Apparently the federal government is considering a law where all ISPs must record your activities such as upload and download amounts and report it to the authorities. The question I ask is this: What do you think about Canada actually making file sharing illegal? What about those people with MP3 players? The young ones out there with mp3 players and no credit card to pay for songs would be kinda foobared.
Interesting.
-Stoker.
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That Globe article isn't very clear. Some days, it amazes me that the tech reporters at the Globe can even spell their own names right... So, get the announcement straight from the horse's mouth here, or at least check out this more accurate article.
The big thing for file sharers: If the changes go through, sharing music online will be illegal.
Up until now, sharing music on the Internet was in a grey area. Copying music for private use is legal -- since the 1997 copyright law changes that brought in the blank media tax (currently 21 cents per blank CD) -- so downloading music online is legal if you don't plan to share it. If this next set of changes goes through, copyright holders will be able to prohibit others from "making available" their music, so sharing of copyrighted music without permission will definitely be illegal.
It doesn't look like Internet Service Providers are actually going to have to track all their subscribers' activities; but with the changes, when a copyright holder notifies an ISP that some subscriber seems to be violating their copyright, the ISP will have to keep a record of the notice and pass it on to the infringing subscriber. (So what? Well, there's probably some way this can be used as part of a court case later on.)
Of course, none of this is for certain until the changes are introduced in parliament. And who knows if they will pass.
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