Journal: News & Comment

Sharing files

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"Canada could become a model for countries seeking to find a balance between protecting copyright holders' rights and providing consumers with more liberal rights to copyrighted works."

I'm not sure how comfortable I am with my country's approach—nearly none of my CD-R discs have music on them, yet I pay a levy as if they all did, for instance—but I prefer it to that of the United States. Still, it does seem odd that in Canada it is apparently legal for individuals to download songs from strangers over the Internet without paying directly, but it's not legal to provide those songs for downloading.

There may not be a logical inconsistency in a ruling like that, but it does imply that, while it's okay to get music for free, you can only get it from outside the country. Weird.

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