You have to listen to this -- in it, the Minister lies, dodges, weaves and ducks around plain, simple questions like, "If the guy at my corner shop unlocks my phone, is he breaking the law?" and "If my grandfather breaks the DRM on his jazz CDs to put them on his iPod, does that break the law?" and the biggie, "All the 'freedoms' your law guarantees us can be overriden by DRM, right?" (Prentice's answer to this last one, "The market will take care of it," is absolutely priceless.)
— Canadian Industry Minister lies about his Canadian DMCA on national radio, then hangs up - Boing Boing (see my post from yesterday for the audio)
01:12 PM | 3 Comments

Comments

  1. A few thoughts. 1. Conservatives are usually douches anyway. Does it surprise you that Jim Prentice is a douche? Jim Prentice is a Conservative; ergo, he is a douche. 2. He tried to pass common scenarios off as "arcane" and "out of the ordinary" -- yet those things sound like pretty run-of-the-mill situations. If your Bill doesn't handle regular stuff easily, it's a shitty Bill, and it shouldn't even be tabled. 3. If "the market" will take care of things... why not let "the market" take care of stuff like, well, everything this Bill is trying to do? It's funny how free-market folks will let *some* things be guided by The Invisible Hand, but in other cases are all too happy to intervene (on behalf of corporate interests, natch). 4. Do the Liberals have the stones to stand up to the Conservatives on this? Because if they don't, this thing is gonna pass, no matter how much of a stink Jack Layton puts up. (Knowing the Conservatives, they made this one a Confidence motion, like every other goddamn thing they've foisted on the House in the past year.)
    jtl on June 22, 2008, at 01:09 AMDeleteEdit
  2. Also, this text box thing doesn't handle line-breaks very well. I formatted the above very nicely, and it all gets jammed into one paragraph. Do I have to manually put < br > tags into everything?
    jtl on June 22, 2008, at 01:11 AMDeleteEdit
  3. You're right. It was a shitty comments module so I just hacked it to support line returns and *bold* with the * character
    Riz on June 22, 2008, at 10:57 PM