We live in a world with jurisprudence gone mad. Lawyers are the modern Samurai and the arena of combat is every aspect of your life. All parties engaged in a battle so brutal and all encompassing you cant escape it through death.
Its universally and totally mistakenly agreed that modern western justice is a creation of natural law. So the bias of fairness is built into the system. God did not appoint or select our judges, humans did. Justice is as good or bad as the humans that created it and the precedents that allow the institution to evolve as the final arbiter of good and evil.
Copyright law has become a watermark on the page of fair use. There are very few original thoughts. Therefore balancing the interests of creators who themselves copied against the common sense of the community is a challenge.
In the USA and the UK copyright holders have the Justice system in their pocket. From making the laws to enforcing them the balance is almost totally on the side of the content manufactures. The difference that is Canadian Justice, was highlighted this week in a landmark ruling. Allen Mendelsohn one of Canada's preeminent internet law experts explains it in easy to read detail with great clarity.
Why are Canadians being protected from Copyright trolls? In the USA the idea of social justice has never been part of the landscape. In the UK there is no Charter of Rights to protect the citizens from the special interests let alone the goverment.
So Canadians should be proud and thankful we have a society where the Judges in general believe in the rights of the people, and where we had a leader like Pierre Elliot Trudeau who enshrined a just society in a document that has the final say.
Now admit it, if you stream or download you are a liberal at heart.
Steve, lawyerism- if I may use that term respectfully, has a very important role to play in being a voice for the silenced and all of that. But in the area of debate, Q&A, interviews and speeches, while proposing cogent, factual, understandable arguments to the governing con's, it's somewhat difficult to jump over the heaping piles of con Harperism that masquerades itself as a valid point of view. As diligence, resilience and perseverance make us what we are as a nation's people-- so the lawyers we've elected in Ottawa could very well put a lot more emphasis, when talking to Canadian's,on slaying con strawmen and poison-well tactics. Thanks for listening!
ReplyDeletePolitics which is supposed to be war without violence depends upon good arguments well said. It also helps if these arguments can be supported by facts on the ground. Lawyers are trained to argue. I love to argue and would put myself up against any lawyer, lobbyist or politician on issues I understood. A politician must be a Swiss army knife of argument to be successful. They all win some lose some, the reality is like a knife fight which wounds are fatal and which wounds will heal. There is not now and never has been any political party which is pure. Its just a question of which political party will on the margins improve the life of the citizens, and strive to make those margins larger on the page.
DeleteI do not believe in good or evil. Killer whales killing seals are not evil they are natural. If your a seal its a different perspective of course.
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