Last Updated on: 1st May 2014, 02:44 pm
Well gees Louise, what do you know? Because I happen to bein favour of equal access to information and so don’t particularly care for the Conservative government’s new copyright bill,that makes mean “absolutist” and a “radical extremist” in the eyes of Heritage Minister James Moore.Thanks, Jim.
He made the remarks during a speech at an international business conference on piracy in Toronto Yesterday.
“The only people who are opposed to this legislation are really two groups of radical extremists,” he said. “In the continuum of political ideology, if you go really extreme to the right or really extreme to the left, it actually swings back around.”
“These people out there who pretend to be experts, who the media all cite, they don’t believe in copyright reform whatsoever,” Moore said in comments after the speech that were posted online.
Reform isn’t the problem. Crappy, poorly thought out reform that has the potential to hinder people’s personal growth and equal rights is the problem.
“They will find any excuse to oppose this bill, to drum up fear, to mislead, to misdirect and to push people in the wrong direction and to undermine what has been a year-long comprehensive effort to get something right.”
Drum up fear, mislead, misdirect, push people in the wrong direction, undermine…are we still talking about the bill, or have we moved on to discussing the few things his government does well?
As for that spending a year getting it right part…maybe you need another one? The bill isn’t all bad, but the stuff that is bad is bad enough to effectively kill the good.
Moore also decried “those absolutists out there … who are babyish in their approach to copyright legislation, who think that any idea of copyright reform will be an attack on individual citizens.”
As an individual citizen and apparent baby, I’d like to ask Mr. Moore what I’m supposed to do when there’s something I want to read but I can’t get it into a format suitable for me and my disability because some publishing company put a lock on it. Is he willing to run afoul of his own ill-conceived industry friendly rules and break that lock for me in order to protect my rights as a consumer and person? Perhaps he’s forgotten this, but the idea of reforming something is to make it better for everyone, not just the everyones with lots of money and the right friends.
He urged guests at the business forum to push back against those who oppose the bill.
“When they speak, they need to be confronted, if it’s on Facebook, if it’s Twitter, if it’s on a talk show, in a newspaper, confront them and tell them they are wrong,” Moore said.
Feel free to confront me if you wish, just make sure you do it in a manner that’s DRM free and technologically accessible to all.
