michael geist

More and more problems with SOPA keep coming up.

We've been expecting Canadian politicians to re-introduce last year's bad copyright reform bill without any changes.

It's a bit of a stereotype that Canadians love their hockey. But do they love it so much that they file share while attending hockey games?

Recently, the movie studio Voltage Pictures decided to extend its braindead, shortsighted, shakedown of those it accuses (on weak evidence) of file sharing its movie, The Hurt Locker, to Canada.

Michael Geist recently wrote about some more leaked State Department cables concerning copyright policy in a foreign country -- this time in his home country of Canada, where, as we've seen pretty much everywhere else, when it comes to copyright policy, everything shows the close handiwork of American interests.

In fact, one cable Geist highlights concerns a Canadian politician promising US diplomats that they can see a copy of the copyright reform proposal before it's even introduced in Parliament.

For years, we've discussed the various attempts up in Canada for the CPCC -- the Canadian Private Copying Collective -- to put its "you must be a criminal" tax on the iPod and on your ISP.

Both efforts have failed, and now it appears they're just trying totally random stuff just for the hell of it.

Michael Geist has the news that last year, at some point, the recording industry filed a lawsuit against IsoHunt in Canada.

There's already been an ongoing lawsuit against IsoHunt in the US, but not too many people realized there was a similar lawsuit in Canada.

And that's for a specific reason: the recording industry did their best to keep it quiet.

Michael Geist notes that the Australian Government's Productivity Commission (which is apparently an independent research and advisory arm) is suggesting that the government no longer agree to include intellectual property issues in trade agreements -- and specifically focuses on the lack of evidence that such intellectual property agreements benefit Australia economically.

A whole bunch of you have been sending in variations on the story, first highlighted by Michael Geist that the CBC (Canada's public broadcasting offering) has stopped using Creative Commons music in its podcasts.

That was first revealed in the comments to a recent show, when someone asked why there were no links to Creative Commons music (something the show had apparently done before).

Michael Geist: "This week the Business Software Alliance published a new study which purports to estimate the economic gain from a ten percent reduction in piracy of business software.

For Canada, the BSA claims that the reduction would create over 6,000 new jobs and generate billions in GDP and tax revenue"

A couple years ago, we wrote about how Swiss officials had told Logistep to stop snooping on suspected file sharers as it violated their privacy.

However, a year later, a court ruled otherwise.