Yes, because if the election is called (which it hadn’t been yet), the bill will die. No, because the bill will get re-introduced in some form, regardless of who gets into power. We’ve been on this merry-go-round before.

Therefore, with an election looming, it’s more important than ever to keep the pressure and attention on this issue. Canadians have been outraged at the potential implications of this bill, and therefore it is a potential election issue (albeit a minor one). We can at least ensure the most heinous parts of this bill get watered down or removed entirely.

For example, coping and selling pirated DVDs is an illegal activity that could land a person in jail for five years and hit them with $500,000.00 fine, yet we still have many stores downtown that sell them. We only hear about a couple of these stores being raided every year.

I say let them pass the bill, in the end, there is a human limitation to implementing it.

Get out of the way, let the markets sort it out.

And I’m about to say something totally communist…

Looking at the success of open sourced, public domained works such as Wikipedia, Linux, and other such improvements for human kinds, it seems totally illogical for government to denounce such innovations.

To copyrights, they should in theory help innovation, but they do not perform that function when they are used by giant corporations as tools to sweep away the “undergrowth” innovations.

Copyrights should be abandoned completely in my opinions, and innovations backed by taxes from our government. People always find a way to go around paying, seeing all the pirating that the government KNOW they can never get rid of, they should start thinking outside of the box.

As to this Bill C-61, I do think we, all, every single one of us not so conservative to support this, should call our local MPs immediately.

It is much easier to prevent than to cure. This is true to human bodies and human bodies alike.

In many cases these companies may be able to argue the user was informed about the software’s behavior in the End User License Agreement. These are onerously long legal documents that most users simply click through without reading – but that click-through signals acceptance of the terms of the license, which may give the companies an out.

However, understand that companies spying on users is nothing new. Your TiVo reports on your TV consumption behavior. Your American Express purchases are aggregated and sold off to marketing firms to provide demographic data. Your photo is taken numerous times by public and private surveillance cameras. This is nothing new. That’s not to say you should be complacent, merely aware of the implications as computing power grows and data-mining software grows more sophisticated.

This is exactly why such sections should be removed. Failing to do so, the result will be a chilling effect on innovation – pirates will keep going about their business, but innovative services will never get off the ground for fear of prosecution.

Just look at how long it’s taken to get video on the iPod, versus music on the iPod. The DMCA prevented the creation of tools that would allow users to rip content they had already purchased from DVDs (which are protected by encryption), and hence an entire spectrum of possible services stagnated. Well, stagnated for the general public – those users who were technically savvy enough to break the DVD encryption were unaffected, although in doing so they were now technically “pirates” even if their use of their own DVDs should have been considered Fair Use.