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Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

canada.ca

21–30 of 92 posts

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#21
post #15

A friend of mine (Canadian) uses piracy sites a lot for one reason: all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu)

>all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu)

Like what? I saw a comment[1] a few days ago saying something to this effect, but someone replied pointing out it was available, just not in a manner that OP was satisfied with. FWIW I checked a hulu original that I recently watched, and it was available in canada under disney+.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26772054

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#22
People should understand, Canada's heritage minister (Guilbeault) has been trying to implement an online blocking system for a while now.

The current government (Liberals) have shut down parliament, during covid, only to prevent investigations into their WE charity corruption.

When a 3rd party candidate Maxime Bernier attempted his own party ... the media by law had to give him equal air time, but his reach was censored (ex: they set his youtube videos to unlisted).

The "Rebel Media" a right wing news org was prevented from entering a federal debate. They had to get an 11th hour injunction to be let in, and even after, the Liberal leader (Trudeau) refused to answer any questions.

This will be used to silence political dissidence, and "hate speech" law violators.

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#23

Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time. "For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online" Hrmph. Citation required. Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside: * The DMCA already…

> The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.

The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#27
post #21
post #15

A friend of mine (Canadian) uses piracy sites a lot for one reason: all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu)

>all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu) Like what? I saw a comment[1] a few days ago saying something to this effect, but someone replied pointing out it was available, just not in a manner that OP was satisfied with. FWIW I checked a hulu original that I recently watched, and it was available in canada under disney+. [1] https://news.ycombinator.co…

The hulu stuff in disney+ is super brand new. Generally there is a lot of content not accessible here.

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#28
This will do little to nothing to piracy. Commercial copyright infringement is already a crime and police can shutdown piracy websites in Canada. Isohunt guy cant attest to that. Meanwhile big entities like pornhub(Canadian org) regularly has copyright infringed content and the government does nothing about that.

Piracy as a reason is a complete lie.

This is about far more about political censorship in Canada. This is about censoring the media and free speech.

The current government has extensive experience at censoring their political opponents. They are quite public about 'accreditation' of the media and 'licensing' the news.

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#29
post #15

A friend of mine (Canadian) uses piracy sites a lot for one reason: all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu)

My daughter's friend uses a VPN to watch Netflix (paid account, not shared), apparently for EU shows or something. She's 14 years old. (we live in Canada)

Re: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites

#30

Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time. "For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online" Hrmph. Citation required. Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside: * The DMCA already…

> * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well. What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained tracti…

> I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy.

I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established.

Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?

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