Music Piracy

I think like two classes ago we talked about music piracy and the laws concerning it. So right now in Canada the laws are kind of confusing and they contradict each other. In the United States, the record companies got IP adresses from people downloading from ISPs (Internet Service Provider) and they fined them. There's two laws we talked about. One is fair use and the other is concerning copyright infringment. The fair use law says that if you buy a music CD then you're allowed to rip it to your computer for your personal use as long as you don't distribute it. The other law is that if a copyright is placed on something owned by someone your not allowed to break it. The law on downloading music right now is that you're allowed to download music but not upload it. The laws are about to change is six months and they make it a criminal offense to even rip a CD for your own purposes. The ethical choice you have to make is whether you want to download music. Some people first download a song, then buy it to support the artist. Some artists have websites where you can donate money if you download their music. To stop illegal distribution of music, online music services have what's called DRM or Digital Rights Management. It protects the file from being shared to other people. Downloading movies and software however is still illegal.

Today we read an article in the Toronto Star about police catching people selling counterfeit DVDs in Montreal. The article claims that Canada is becoming a world leader in pirated movies. Montreal is the international center where people go to moive theatres and record the movies on camera and then realease the movie on the internet. Hollywood stuidos such as 20th Century Fox threaten to delay realeasing movies in Canadian Theatres. And because movies are also released in French in Canada pirates can also sell the movies to the European market. The RCMP are currently running a large scale investigation in Montreal to track down bootleggers.