Wow, this could cause some serious problems for commuters!


Big Brother is alive and kicking in the Great White North. According to The Vancouver Sun, the Canadian government is preparing to revamp its copyright laws in regard to portable electronics, including laptops and iPods, as it forges an alliance with the U.S. and the European Union called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA would essentially turn international borders into a copyright Gestapo, compelling border guards to check "laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that 'infringes' on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies."

You ripped a DVD legally (say, using one of those digital download editions now included on some discs)? Doesn't matter. Guards can seize your iPod and even destroy it if they deem you've broken the law. Then you will be fined. Canada already performs random searches of laptops to search for child pornography. The new rules would step up these searches considerably.

Of the myriad problems with such a law, the first thing that leaps to mind is my bafflement over ACTA's failure to distinguish between legal and illegal content, and (if they do eventually give a pass for legal content) how border guards could determine whether a video was downloaded legally from iTunes or illegally from BitTorrent. Is all this going to happen in the lines at Customs as travelers wait to get back home? Is this, seriously, what our security infrastructure ought to be concerned with? How much will Canada spend each year on guards searching iPods and cell phones for illegal videos? Everything about ACTA just screams wrong.

Of course, ACTA is not just a Canada thing. The U.S., where the vast majority of illegal copied content originates, has been floating this idea to dozens of countries for about a year. But Canada's secret negotiations on actually enacting the rules are what are giving people pause. The good news: At the upcoming G8 meeting, ACTA is expected to be tabled... for now.

LINK: Copyright deal could toughen rules governing info on iPods, computers