Why Copyright?

In December of 2007, Canadians were made aware of a copyright reform bill that was making its way in Canadian Parliament without any input from consumers, artists, and the public in general that will make illegal many of the creative freedoms Canadians currently enjoy and make them criminals in the eyes of the law. The law proposed was basically a copy of the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act drafted by the likes of RIAA and MPAA and fostered upon the United States.

Cory Doctorow warned:

If this law passes, it will mean that as soon as a device has any anti-copying stuff in it (say, a Vista PC, a set-top cable box, a console, an iPod, a Kindle, etc), it will be illegal for Canadians to modify it, improve it, or make products that interact with it unless they have permission from the (almost always US-based) manufacturer. This puts the whole Canadian tech industry at the mercy of the US industry, unable to innovate or start new businesses that interact with the existing pool of devices and media without getting a license from the States

Furthermore, as reported by Canada's Globe and Mail, the law will make it illegal for consumers to remove the highly illegal Sony Rootkit Trojan from their own computers:

Further, informed sources are getting steamed already. In his blog, copyright lawyer and litigator Howard Knopf is predicting that the bill will “put digital locks on our computers, cellphones, iPods, other gadgets and tools and, ultimately, our culture,” just like the DCMA does. He goes on to speculate that the bill would make it a copyright infringement (as it is in the United States) to try to remove Digital Rights Management and Technical Protection Measures from your computer, such as the infamous Sony anti-infringing technology of a few years ago that was based on a very dangerous hacker’s tool called a “rootkit.”

Michael Geist, a heroic law professor that was so instrumental in help defeating (or at least delaying) the passage of C-61, the Canadian DMCA, has released a video titled "Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law" on YouTube.

The video tackles the controversial Sony Rootkit incident, in which Sony employs the use of hacker technology to cripple consumers' computers (and an interesting irony, the very same technology they were using to combat copyright infringement was "stolen" and infringed copyrights; it seems that in their zeal to combat copyright infringement, they were willing to violate copyrights). (View BoingBoing's timeline of all the coverage in six parts.) Sony's actions were so odious that the State of Texas sued Sony for violating its anti-spyware laws.

But what finally forced Sony to make amends was the lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). They were forced to recall millions of intentionally infected CDs.