WhiteEagle’s Aerie and Blog

Canada’s Minister of Industry Plans to Make Parliament Pass US Style Digital Media Act!

According to Boing Boing, Prentice plans to make parliament pass US Style Digital Copyright laws. Here’s what the original article had to say:

Word on the street is that Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice is about to try to shove the Canadian version of the US’s failed Digital Millennium Copyright Act through Parliament very soon, and very fast. He made plans to do this before, and the overwhelming public outcry caused him to shelve them, but now he figures we’re all distracted and we’ll let him get away with it (especially since he’s made a couple of cosmetic changes to the bill that he’ll use to show how much he really, really cares about us poor Canadians, rather than the US government and entertainment companies who are giving him marching orders).

The Tories promised that they wouldn’t do any more treaty-law without public consultation, but Prentice stalwartly refuses to have any public consultation on his plans, despite outcry from industry (he’s the Minister of Industry, remember?), artists’ groups, library groups, educator groups, and public interest groups. He just keeps on ploughing ahead with his half-baked plan to follow the US off the same stupid copyright cliff it leapt off of in 1998 when it passed the DMCA, a law which has done nothing to reduce infringement, but which has screwed up libraries, competition, and education, and has led to lawsuits against tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.

So it looks like we’re going to have to do it again: we’re going to have to write to Prentice, rally at his office, phone him and let him know that we’re still watching and still paying attention, and that we still demand that he listen to the public — the way his party promised they would — before he brings down this law.

Please write to your MP, the PM, and Minister Prentice to tell them that you do not want US Style DRM laws to be put on the books here!