Opposition To Canadian DMCA Grows

from the don't-follow-our-bad-example dept

Thu, Dec 13th 2007 11:58am — Timothy Lee

Michael Geist reports that a Facebook group he created to oppose Canada's version of the DMCA has swelled to 20,000 members in under two weeks. Perhaps as a result of citizen opposition, the Canadian government has apparently shelved the proposal for the year, although it will likely be brought up again next year. There are a couple of interesting things about this. First, a decade of bad press about the American DMCA has no doubt helped to galvanize Canadian activists against the legislation. The bad effects of the Canadian copyright proposal aren't hypothetical. Canucks just have to look to their neighbors to the South for real-world examples of the problems created by anti-circumvention law. Secondly, it's interesting how easy Facebook makes it to organize an effort like this. A generation ago, it would have taken thousands of dollars and months of effort to build a list of 20,000 people interested in a political issue. Now it can be done for free in a matter of days. It remains to be seen if opposition to a Canadian DMCA will be successful, but the odds are certainly better than they would have been a decade ago.

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Filed Under: canada, copyright, dmca

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DaveW, 13 Dec 2007 @ 3:16pm

Facebook - no respect
It's interesting watching Facebook become a medium for social protest - too many politicians are still pretty clueless about Facebook.

Matthew Ingram from the Globe and Mail newspaper (and a great blog) writes:

"Will such incidents help Facebook and the blogosphere get some respect in Ottawa? That's hard to say, but ignoring a medium that can generate more than 20,000 dissatisfied voters in a little over a week doesn't seem like a great strategy, even for the government."

Oops - I quoted something... FAIR USE! FAIR USE! Don't sue me please Matthew!
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Josh, 13 Dec 2007 @ 3:59pm

Progress
And to think, even just a few years ago, this would only be possible through email, which you would think is still an easy medium one could use to get people organized. Facebook has made this even easier. I've joined that mentioned group, and I'm glad to see it's actually having some impact, since most Facebook "cause" groups don't usually see much happen.
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pat donovan, 16 Dec 2007 @ 5:30am

dmr
my biggest fear is (what i call) the BB effect...

big-brother black-balls the blacklist.

for the very best of reasons, the corp version of the web simply stops working... well, except for disneyland.

censored-out websites, news black-out list, blackballed
users. BB BB BB

had a root/DNS attack last week. torgan redirect.
provider was clueless and ineffective correcting the prob.

intersting, eh?
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