Canadian Content Lobbyists Pushing For ISP Liability
Date : 01 22 2008 Category : Business
Techdirt
As the debate up in Canada continues over its plans to introduce new, more stringent, copyright legislation, a somewhat disturbing trend is appearing. While the earlier debate focused mainly on the similarities between Canada's draft legislation and the US's DMCA, it appears that some lobbyists are using the delay to push for something even more extreme: ISP liability. They're using recent wins in Europe over ISP liability, as well as AT&T's brain-dead proposals to filter unauthorized materials as an opening to push for much stronger copyright laws that include ISP liability, effectively using legislation to take their own business model problems and technical ignorance and dump those problems on everyone else. This ability to try to force the rest of the world to change to compensate for their own short-sightedness is breathtaking, and would be deserving of envy, if it weren't so effective. Right now, about the only good news coming out of this debate in Canada is that the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, has pointed out that many of these proposals risk undermining individual privacy rights. Unfortunately, privacy supporters don't tend to donate nearly as much money to politicians as stronger copyright supporters.
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