This video with Cory Doctorow is one of the lead awareness raising tools about a proposed (although it may already have passed) new legislation in Canada. Bill 61-C proposes quite a few significant change in Canadian Copyright law in response to changing social trends in the way people deal with such material. Rather than acknowledging that culture and business are changing and that new models of acceptability are emerging, it seems (from most accounts I’ve read) that Bill 61-C seems to be quite retrograde in the way it hopes to handle things.

The OpenSourceCinema blog has this to say:

Here’s some stuff to love about the new bill, C-61::

-$500 per downloaded song
-No Fair Use rights for remix culture
-$20,000 for uploading content (youtube anyone?)

There is a campaign afoot to use one of these posters to create a mugshot of yourself to be used in a video to protest the proposed legislation.

There are some concerns by some remixers and culture co-opters that by tagging themselves as criminal they are accepting the legitimacy of the laws. And while the exercise is satirical I can see the advertising agency that the Canadian government uses choosing to use the Creative Commons attributions to represent the people as criminals by repositioning their images inside a government anti-piracy/anti-copying campaign ad.

The Copyright Criminals video sample is currently available at http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/

Copyright Criminals