The Penalty Box

Jim Prentice, the Minister of Industry, has decided to become a lapdog of the recording industry by proposing a new DMCA bill, worse than the American one if you can believe it.  This would make copying a song from a CD you bought onto your MP3 player to listen to completely illegal.  You can’t even make a backup of it.  It pretty much throws fair use straight out of the window.  I’m not entirely sure how Prentice expects this to pass in a minority government with so much public outcry over it.  He’s already tried to pass this through before and failed, trying to bypass public consultation then too.  Michael Geist is a law professor that explained all the fancy legalese into plain English.
To end on a less negative note, I wish could happen at my office.  It would be all kinds of awesome.

Previously, I mentioned how the CBC was showing how its managers are competing with cat turd on levels of intelligence.  Today, they cemented their place in turd smarts history by not only losing the rights to the HNIC theme song to CTV for perpetuity, but they also are launching a campaign to let any knucklehead with access to a synthesizer and a drum machine come up with the next theme for HNIC.  Oh yeah, and it’ll be decided by the fans.  Because we all know how well fan balloting works.
In the last 3 years, the CBC has lost or gotten rid of the following:

• Grey Cup final
• Curling
• Olympics
• Chris Cuthbert
• Theme to HNIC

In the last 3 years, CTV (and subsidiary TSN) has picked up the following:

• All of the above

The CBC. Your public tax dollars, hard at work.

Just when I thought the CBC couldn’t do anything dumber than firing Chris Cuthbert, backing out on the CFL, hiring PJ Stock and Greg Millen or thinking Shawn Majumder has talent, they do this.  Not bringing back the Hockey Night in Canada theme song? What kind of drugs do you have to be on to consider something like that? I could understand if the people who owned the rights were gouging, but they seem pretty reasonable for wanting to continue the contract and the terms they asked.  But the CBC is a government institution, so they obviously have to commit acts of sheer incompetence to maintain their public image.  I guess there’s still some hope; the public backlash has caused them to say they’re considering their options rather that flat out going elsewhere.
I swear, if they use that stupid Nickelback remix of Elton John I will burn down Studio 42.