Categories: Capital Read, Inside the Queensway

Potential copyright infringment: Not worth the risk.

by kadyomalley on Thursday, September 11, 2008 11:09am - 35 Comments

Dear Overzealous Web Designer in the Basement of the Conservative War Room:

Hi! I know you’re probably busy dealing with the — uh, bandwidth issues that brought down DionBook (still readable – for now – via googlecache), but I just wanted to let you know about another potential headache-in-the-making over at notaleader.ca.

You know that line about how it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission? That’s actually not always the case — not when you’re talking about, say, copyright — which is something that you’d think the Conservatives would have learned by now.

Yet, on your create-your-own-ad flash thingy, there are all sorts of video snippets from various networks – CTV, CBC, TVO and possibly others – but I can’t find anywhere that it says that material is being used with permission.

In fact, there’s nothing to indicate where the footage came from at all – which is required if you were planning to use the ‘fair dealing’ exemption, although it’s hard to see how this qualifies as “criticism or review.”

Did you just forget to add that information? Did it get accidentally removed when you took down the puffin? Or are we heading towards another one of those copyright oopsies moments that seem to crop up with surprising frequency when y’all try to get down with your bad multimedia-user-content-generating selves?

Anyway, hope you’re having a fab Day Five! Can’t be worse than Day Three, right?

ITQ

PS Say hi to The Ghost of Sir Charles Tupper for me!

Tags: conservatives, conversations with imaginary web designers, notaleader.ca, this web 2.0 thing may be more trouble than it's worth

More by kadyomalley

Wayne

I too agree with Sisyphus : reeducation of our fifth column is exactly what is in order! oops this might now work as the first stage in reeducation is self criticism – and that never goes over well with those that love to label and analyze others!
Baloneyman

jwl, Wayne and Sisyphus! Stop wasting yopur time on this blog and get back to putting more content on that notaleader.ca thing.
There’s an election on!
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Craig Hubley

Just more criminal behaviour by the Conservatives.

Attempted bribery (of Chuck Cadman), illegal campaign finance (“in and out”), defying the wil of the House and the standing treaty obligations under Kyoto Protocol, breaking the fixed election date law which required them to go to the House and possibly get their own MPs to vote a non-confidence against their own government (very embarassing but that was exactly the point, to make it hard to call a snap election). Oh and lying about candidates in a federal election, which they do in almost every radio and TV appearance – which is also a crime in Canada.

The RCMP isn’t doing it’s job. These people should be arrested and Elections Canada should be refusing to let them appear on the ballot.
Omar Khadr

Whats that Mr. Harper I cant hear you? it seems you have your foot in your mouth…

every vote for the CON servatives is a vote to destroy Canada.
http://www.abandonedstuff.com/ saskboy

The fact that Stephen Harper wants to make people criminals for putting their DVDs on iPods, is not something that has bubbled up in the campaign yet. But I expect it will, and must.
http://macleans.ca allniter

I agree, saskboy…for the latest on the fight against C-61, Micheal Geist’s website has it all. Plus check out “Canadian Music Creators’ Coalition” for a list of artists vehemently opposed to the Bill, and their reasons why.

Even though there is an election going on, the pressure on the House from us should not be allowed to subside. We are Canadians, not an American state, and this dangerous piece of legislation is a poor excuse for Harper’s “tough on crime” rhetoric he’s been spewing of late. Can you imagine doing more time in prison than a murderer for downloading some music because you couldn’t afford to pay the ridiculous fine? Under this Bill, you could. A day in jail for every ten bucks.

Keep the pressure on, fellow Canucks! We must be heard!
http://www.flora.ca Russell McOrmond

Kady O’Malley,

The issues between Copyright and Trademark are indeed not interchangeable.

In the case of your copyright suggestions, this is a government that is intent on making more complex a law which they clearly don’t understand already, and have already infringed.

In the case of the alleged trademark issue which conservative partisans want to bring up, there is no issue as there was no trademark. Yes, the Liberals should have been in better communication with someone with a similar sounding name in order to be nicer people, but there is no trademark rights issue — just a dumb political move that generates bad publicity.

I’m not a fan of the Liberals because they have some technology law neanderthals as well, and while their C-60 is far better than the Conservative C-61, it was still headed in the same backward direction. That said, the comments on this blog from the conservative partisans are embarrassing in how off-the-mark they are. All they are doing is proving the point that they have some actual learning to do before they support their parties pushing through policy in this area.
Damien Fox

Thanks, Russell!

I agree that the ruling political party doesn’t even know what the current copyright laws are, and they’re trying to rush through a whole bunch of new and complicated rules.

Maybe they would better serve Canadians by simplifying some of the good aspects of copyright law, and getting rid of a whole bunch of ineffective and useless rules. They could start with the prohibition on time-shifting TV and videos (legal in the US, but not here!), format-shifting from my DVD to my iPod (legal in the US, but not here!) or combining a recent pop song to my niece’s school graduation video…

Most Canadians wouldn’t believe these are “illegal” activities, but that goes to show how out-of-touch copyright law is theses days, and how out-of-touch some of the lobbyists and politicians are when they try to push through more rules and more fines to prop up that system.
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