Movie Piracy: Blame Canada vs the Truth

Once again it seems that Cana­dian atti­tudes toward Digit­al Rights Man­age­ment, Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­erty, and Copy­right are the tar­gets of Big Media. 

Warner Bros. Pic­tures issued a release today that states, among oth­er things:

Frus­trated with unau­thor­ized cam­cord­ing of its new releases in Cana­dian cinemas, the stu­dio said it will imme­di­ately halt all “pro­mo­tion­al and word-of-mouth screen­ings” of upcom­ing releases.

…

“Canada is the No. 1 pri­or­ity in terms of anti-cam­cord­ing legis­la­tion,” said Darcy Ant­on­el­lis, seni­or vp world­wide anti-pir­acy oper­a­tions at Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Pure crap.

Michael Geist, a renowned Cana­dian Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­erty expert as the Canada Research Chair of Inter­net and E‑commerce Law at the Uni­ver­sity of Ott­awa takes sig­ni­fic­ant issue with the claims Warner uses to sup­port this action.

As for the claims that Canada does not have laws to address the issue, it bears repeat­ing that Canada does have laws that make record­ing a movie an infringe­ment and where the record­ing is for the pur­poses of dis­tri­bu­tion there is the pro­spect of severe fines and jail time.  Indeed, last month the RCMP told the Industry Com­mit­tee that they are work­ing on an invest­ig­a­tion that involves cam­cord­ing, though there are resource issues since health and safety con­cerns take priority.

There’s more to this, but you’d best read both posts for the full details.
Me, I’m still stick­ing to my ori­gin­al think­ing that Big Media just does­n’t know how to handle online media and new media because they’ve got too much inves­ted in the ‘old way of doing business’. 

They’re try­ing to put the Genie back into the bottle, unfor­tu­nately he’s just too big to fit.

And as a Cana­dian cit­izen and tax­pay­er, I think the gov­ern­ment has more import­ant issues on the nation­al agenda — hello, Afgh­anistan any­one — than cre­at­ing laws that make sure Big Medi­a’s not threatened ?

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Canada, Pir­acy, Movies, Enter­tain­ment, Ban, Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­erty, DRM