Have you written your MP about DMCA yet?

By now everyone's familiar with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act: it's US copyright law that may soon be adapted for Canada. The DMCA is good for one thing: profits to corporations. Nothing wrong with that, except that in this case the profits will come off the backs of the Canadian public, and things we take for granted that we do every day to make our lives a little better will suddenly become copyright crimes. And the Powers That Be will act on the law:

"The recording industry won a key fight Thursday against illegal music downloading when a U.S. federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay $222,000 US for sharing copyrighted music online.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 US for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs online in violation of their copyrights."

The threat isn't limited to sharing music files. Potentially the DMCA would affect libraries and schools by choking off access to learning material. Your carefree days of surfing the net and linking up to this video or that article would be over. Imagine trying to blog without being able to link to sources unless you paid for them. For students it's even more potentially devastating, since their grades depend on being able to access information. Ominously, there are also privacy issues -- how do the PTB police this thing? Do we want/need to be policed? NO!!!

It is up to us, the Canadian Public, to express our outrage about this. If you're not sure what to say, Go here, copy/paste a portion of PSA's letter if you have to, and fire it off -- to your MP, to Harper, and to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who's responsible for this execrable legislation and for some reason doesn't want to discuss it.

More information: PSA has been on this issue from the Word Go
The Galloping Beaver has more
A Creative Revolution has still more
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If you haven't written, please please do -- otherwise you may wish you had.

Oh, and the by the way, the Blogging Tories are Stupid. Useless. Cocksuckers. FYI.

UPDATE: Tyler Kinch was in Calgary today and had the opportunity to see Jim Prentice in person. Questions about the DMCA abounded, but answers were in short supply. Bastards.