Region code enforcement has been discussed as a possible violation of World Trade Organization free trade agreements or competition law.[6] The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has warned that DVD players that enforce region coding may violate their Trade Practices Act.[7][8][9] The government of New Zealand is also considering a similar ruling.[10] This means that all DVD players sold in those territories have to be region-free. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code)

If you buy it DVD you should be able to view it wherever you like and whenever you like as long as you don't distribute copies commercially. I believe the legal term is called quite enjoyment.

I would like to government of Canada to stand up for consumers and not the media corporations for once and allow fair use and quite enjoyment of legally bought products.

Older terms for copyright were typically for a period plus an extension. A work would be under copyright for, as an example, 14 years, at which point the author would have to submit paperwork to have it renewed for an additional term. This allowed a number of works to enter the public domain by asking the author the simple question 'is it worth my time to renew this?'

Typically this would be for one extension, but there's no reason it couldn't be for more.

A proposal for from Professor Lawrence Lessig in the US would be for an initial term of 10 years, followed by yearly renewals that cost one dollar. This would allow big corporations to protect their talking mice for as long as they wanted, while allowing access to works that the owner no longer cares about if they are indeed still alive.

I sincerely doubt we'll get a serious re-consideration of copyright term this time around, but automatic, retroactive extension as has happened in the US and elsewhere (putting public domain works that have already lapsed back under copyright) should not happen here. As an artist myself, I know that my work 'stands on the shoulders of giants' (to paraphrase Newton). But I also know that if there's a toll all the way up I'll never be able to make the climb.

I think Professor Lessing has hit the nail on the head and proposes a good solution.

I really don't care if copyright protects my work after I'm dead. My wife may. That is up to my beneficiaries to decide. But that's getting into area beyond this discussion..

"A proposal for from Professor Lawrence Lessig in the US would be for an initial term of 10 years, followed by yearly renewals that cost one dollar. This would allow big corporations to protect their talking mice for as long as they wanted, while allowing access to works that the owner no longer cares about if they are indeed still alive."

But is the public good being served by allowing a certain talking mouse to essentially remain out of the public domain in perpetuity? The whole notion of copyright as it was formulated initially was to allow a limited period of essentially monopoly control (save for Fair Use) before the work went into the public domain. Thus the creator got a chance to make some money, but in the end society got its payment for creating the very notion of intellectual property.

If you simply allow Walt Disney to create an infinite protection then you create the situation in which society has sacrificed a liberty (recognizing the notion of "intellectual property") but with no payback.

To put it another way, the only reason intellectual property exists is because of the general recognition that sometimes legal fictions (like making corporate entities, to a limited degree, legal persons) create a benefit. But if you essentially take away the benefit, then why should society even tolerate the notion of "intellectual property" at all? As I've said repeatedly, art, music and literature all existed for millennia without the benefit without such protections.

My opinion is that copyright should be an absolute 25 years, period. No renewals, no nothing. A quarter of a century is plenty of time for any artist to profit from their work, to enjoy society's largesse of creating the idea of a "intellectual property". After that, society gets the full benefit.

I'd agree with you generally that shorter terms are better. I placed Professor Lessig's suggestion here in the context of opening more debate (Professor Lessig argued Eldred v Ashcroft at the US Supreme Court against retroactive copyright term extension).

Another approach might be a limited term (10-25 years for example) followed by a series of possible extensions (e.g. every 1-15 years) to a certain limit (say 50-100 years total).

This allows for valuable works to stay protected for a long but limited time, while leaving open several windows for orphaned works to enter the public domain. It also mandates regular reconsideration by the copyright owners as to the value of a work. Simply put, if it isn't worth your time to renew, let it go.

Personally speaking, as an artist, I'd love to live to see the day that transformative works are created from mine, but that's just me.

I agree with the notion of an absolute copyright, but would suggest that there should be flexibility in the term, depending on the type of media being considered. Here, I suggest reading an excellent essay by Richard Stallman:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

Here, he describes the "deal" made between society and an artist releasing their work into a space where it could be copied. The deal is that we allow them some exclusive license for copying their work for some time in exchange for the artist releasing it. The question we should be asking (according to Stallman) is: how low can we go?

It's like bargaining for the price of some goods: how much freedom (to copy) are we willing to give up as a society in exchange for ensuring that artists still make the material available. Until we start finding artists who decide "I'm not going to make my music any more, then", we've not dropped the number of years low enough!

For computer software, a copyright term of 5 years might be appropriate. How many people are still running out to buy 5 year-old software? On the other hand, maybe a book or a painting should be longer - like 25 years or even the lifetime of the author/painter.

This should be where the real debate is happening - not about whether or not people should be allowed to view DVDs they've legally purchased …

In fairness, there's plenty of people getting rich off of copyright who have nothing to do with the originators of the work.

Yes, I can agree with that. And there are people who really took the original writers to the cleaners and they are scumbags. But there are also people who legitimately bought publishing from the writers and paid them fairly for it with an eye to profit from it and I don't see anything wrong with that either since the writers were still rewarded for their work.

Need to differentiate between a primary use (by which a writer, say, gets paid through a contract with a distributor/producer/publisher) and a secondary use (where say a consumer PVRs their favourite show, watches it 5 days later or banks a DVD copy of it to loan to a friend). There's no money for the creator in any of those secondary uses, which currently infringe copyright.

But consumers want to do it; so legalize it - as long as you institute a way for some renumeration to flow through to the creator. Collective licensing is the solution. Then the PVR or the DVD includes a modest tariff that will find its way to creators. Consumer gets to do what they want with the material (non-commercially, of course), and the creator of the material is appropriately rewarded. Creators have mortgages or rent to pay too.

The role of content resellers, versus content creators, should be de-emphasised as much as possible as we go forward, despite their protests. While they prefer to be thought of as #1, as it has been in the past, that is no longer the case, nor is it viable for a healthy system.

Far more appropriate now are services which provide a platform for direct content creator licensing and selling of content. For example, iTunes does not appear to try to lay claim to ownership of works it sells, it merely provides a platform for their sales.

I would much prefer we work towards a system in which songwriters are appropriately remunerated /all the time/, rather than ripped off up front and provided dribs and drabs from SOCAN for a few years.

There should be a mechanism by which performers can enter into fair agreements with songwriters without having to make it "worth it" for a publisher.

No one is claiming you are rich, but if you are not rich, then you are probably not a factor in why the lobby groups are trying to push in new laws.

The money in the copyright balance doesn't sit with the creators, and it certainly doesn't sit with the consumers. The lobby groups pushing for new laws are not interested in changing where the money in copyright is, they are interested in getting more of it into the hands of the big corporations they represent. What is it that has your convinced that your interests are the same as theirs?

Is a lower or middle class creator going to benefit from preventing people who purchase their content from format shifting it or time shifting it? Are they likely to benefit extending the copyright to longer that 50 years after they are gone? Are you really going to benefit making breaking digital locks for any purpose illegal?

Keeping in mind the acts of copyright infringment that are already illegal, which of the new laws the lobbyists are pushing for do you think is actually going to help a lower or middle class creator and why?

I agree completely with the above. As a consumer in the land thats strong and free I still feel threatened with how I'm allowed to use my media. We should not be affected by the United States inclination to ensure mass media corporations make massive profits. Set Canada's heritage free by allowing grass roots artists become successful on the net. When the restrictions of current copyright rules are loosened Canadian artists will spread like wild fire. Canadians will be able to see more, hear more and enjoy more Canadian culture! And become internationally acclaimed. I strongly shun America and their attempts to control the market. Piracy is here to stay. Don't cripple the future. Government should leave file sharing alone. Sharing files increases the value of our society without costing citizens their money. Government should help artists focus on the aspects of their profession that will retain value. Such as live appearances.

Government: Leave corporations and lobbyists out of this consultation. Listen to artists and consumers.

I should mention that I do not advocate illegal file sharing, nor do I believe "piracy" (arr matey! What a rediculous p.r. term) is here to stay, at least not in the amounts that we see today (which we see equally here and in the U.S. if we have our eyes open by the way). I believe the extra illegal activity we are seeing is a form of rebellion against what people see as an unfair state of copyright law. I am relatively confident simple compromise would bring it under control.

If you think longterm, it is also likely that the illegal file sharing would eventually degrade if the U.S. style strong arm tactics are used instead. They would eventually forget they were once allowed to freely transfer their records onto cassette to listen to in the car, lend books and tapes to friends, buy software oversees and use it at home, have the whole family share the use of a single software program, etc, and will then accept the new rules.

I prefer the first option though, and I think option 2 would be more trouble. I know I would make sure to teach my kids and grandkids that we once had those freedoms.

Creating more lawsuits is not the answer, cndcitizen. Do you have a legal team standing by? I know I don't. Many of our laws are pretty good, particularly those for landlord-tenant, but who can afford to go up against the mega-corp that owns their apartment building when they steal your damage deposit? Anyway, I'm getting off track.

I agree that the rootkits thing was horrible (a decent discussion on Wikipedia for those not familiar. If you don't like Wikipedia, read the references at the bottom:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protection_scandal), but lawsuits are not the answer. Neither are stiff financial penalties (Discussion of the EU versus Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case), so what do we do when big corporations won't play nice. Well, since corps want all of the good things about being a person under the law, why not treat them like a person. The rootkit was basically breaking and entering with some light identity theft. Unfortunately, we don't have great laws for this kind of betrayal, even at the person level, but let's pretend (for the sake of my gradually weakening argument) that the rootkit thing was equivalent to murder. So, we seize all of their assets (difficult in a multinational corp) in compensation for the victims, and we charge the board of directors as accessories to murder. One case like that, a bunch of rich white people (or perhaps rich Japanese people in the case of Sony) go to jail for a while, and the problem goes away. Extreme, I know, but show me an example of when a big corporation has been brought to heel, and we'll use that model. Corporations are not evil, they just want to make money. In fact, they have a strong, Darwinian (verging on biological) imperative to make money. Ack. I'm sounding too much like an anticorporate nutbar. In summation, real punishments for corps who break the law and when I buy I banana I can do whatever I want with it: eat it, throw it away, use it as a paper weight, blend it in a smoothie, or as a personal pleasure device. Why isn't it the same with copyrighted material? I bought it. It's mine. I can do what I like with it. If you don't want to sell it to me, don't.

Haha…I love the part of the Banana…."I want my copyright like I use my banana…" that is the new Slogan for Copyright…

With respect to the Sony issue, I was shocked that they were not sued as a class action…lots of people were and still are subject to that evil deeds…

Thanks for the reply! I'm glad you liked "The Banana Summation". As for Sony, I remain amazed at how little fallout there was. The reason may be at the heart of all of this discussion. Most people don't really have any idea what Sony did, let alone what they did wrong. I'm not sure whether it's just people not understanding their rights and the importance of protecting them or just ignorance of technology. In any case, we need a place for tech savvy advocates to talk to real people. Ahh, my dreams.