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Posted on 05/30/2008 10:22:27 PM PDT by martin_fierro
Canada: We'll search your iPod for infringing media
Thu May 29, 2008 11:39AM EDT
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.
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May be of interest.
Well of “course”. You are “smuggling”.
As copyright enforcement increases at the border, your CD-Rs also put you into dangerous territory.
This sounds like a nice big load of FUD. I’d like to see a report with more facts and less editorializing.
This is just sad and sick, it’s bad enough they go through your laptops but I-Pods? What about your cassettes and 8-Tracks too? Don’t these people have more important things to do like stop terrorists and murderers?
Copyright deal could toughen rules governing info on iPods, computers
There is still very little hard info, apart from a reference to a supposed leaked document. A lot of speculation.
Proposed US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement (2007)
On the surface, it looks like they are targeting commercial piracy, not some guy taking his iPod through customs.
I immigrated here from Canada and aside from ISP’s there clamping down on Downloads (BT’s), this doesn;t exactly surprise me.
I wonder how the conversations go when they randomly check someone’s laptop for child porn.
“Is there a problem officer?”
“No, you just look like a pedophile, so we thought we would see what sick **** you have on your computer.”
“Oh well no rush.”
Actually, this is going on, on both sides of the US/Canadian border.
The security officer of our company has been telling our executives that if they leave the country, they should ship their laptops to the destination in order to miss these searches.
There does seem to be some question though, on the legality of searching through the file system of a laptop which has been encrypted. And all of my company's laptops and smartphones have been encrypted and locked down.
Mark
Here’s a funny anecdote by a guy who had his laptop searched at the Canadian border:
http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2007/03/crossing-border.html
Since then I have replaced my PDA (which I didn't have with me) with a new cellphone, including a utility for keeping logins & passwords (encrypted). When I go overseas next week, I'm replacing the memory card in the cellphone with one that doesn't have that particular data on it (and never did or will).
It's a brave new world out there...
(Gay State Conservative scratching Canada off of his vacation destination list)
a note to travelers - guards can taser and kill you on Canadian airport, so do not be too vocal about the strip search.
It is a BS to divert attention from other serious issues such as infiltration of terrorists through Canada.
I’ve read other stories in recent months about similar harrassment at various borders, occasionally seizing travelers’ laptops for no particularly good reason ...
For future International travel, I think I will NOT be taking my laptop along. Instead, I will prolly take along, an Internet-enabled GSM phone, such as 3G iphone (coming soon), or one of the Android-platform phones that will begin to hit the streets in the next year or so.
Although customs officials could certainly seize smart phones, it seems considerably less likely than them seizing a laptop.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
Ping.
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