Putting Canadian "Piracy" in Perspective - The Sources

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Putting Canadian "Piracy" in Perspective - The Sources
The video isn't that great, and I hate the background music, but the story it tells is worth the ten minutes. In a nutshell, the numerous reports we have been reading in Canadian and other media about how Canada is a haven for copyright pirates is simply false. Not true. Not even remotely true. And while Michael Geist neatly makes the case against the lobbyists - notably the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), which represents mostly U.S. interests in Canada (the Canadian music publishers and artists have long since left) - what I would like to question is how these false reports end up in our newspapers and (hence) influencing public policy. Almost every day, it seems, people hold up the traditional media as the paragon of reliability the web, the blogosphere and things like Wikipedia ought to be aspiring to. But even more frequently, I see examples of blatant and deliberate falsehood in the traditional media. True, there is no point shouting at them - they have no intent to listen. More...