Submitted by rich_c on April 20, 2009 - 3:30am
I was reading over the weekend about Canada considering introducing something similar to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I hope the good people of Canada fight this and put a stop to it!
To me, all this type of law does is put a lot of power in the hands of large companies so that they can dictate to their 'customers' how the legally purchased 'product' is used and on what hardware. Since when is it a government's job to assist big business in lining their pockets and facilitation shady deals so groups of companies can get together to fleece their joint 'customers' by locking them in to using certain products only? How is healthy competition and innovation a bad thing and monopolies good? A good example of this is the lack of out-of-the-box DVD playing support some Linux distros suffer due to the U.S. DMCA. The fear is that if the distro provides the library for decrypting and playing DVDs as standard, they'll be prosecuted! Of course this is fairly trivial for the end user to fix by installing the missing library through the distro's multimedia repository, but it is an unnecessary chore. Why should there be any concern about providing users with the means to use what they purchased legally?
If you do a bit of investigating into any country's legislation, you'll probably find something like this in force or being considered. Use whatever means you can to complain about it on the ground that it restricts how you enjoy what you legally paid for!
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