Canada Makes Little Headway Against Piracy: Study
Jack Kapica,
Globe, Mail,
Jun 11, 2002
I would like to see one day a report on how the issue of copying content and software is given a biased treatment in the news media (which clearly has a vested interest in the dispute). A case in point is this item, which uncritically repeats statistics released by a business lobby group, to argue for increased fines for "software piracy" (good reporting used to consider the countervailing view, but this is no longer necessary, it seems). I won't dwell on the article's repeated statistical and argumentative errors. They key item in this article is this: "Ms. Scott said that the group's education tactics are not working. It needs to be tougher with violators, she said, who tend to be small and mid-sized businesses that look for cheap or free software to run their computer operations." Two responses. First, if you cannot convince a population that an act is wrong, only repressive sanctions will prohibit the act, and those only temporarily. And second, there was once a day when the desire for cheap software - or anything else - would be loked at as a business opportunity, not as grounds for increasingly severe legislation.
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