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CRIA Loses it's battle to gain filesharer's personal info
Links:
The Globe and Mail
The Register
Forbes
The Toronto Star
BBC
More Articles,
Just a note about the articles: There's many of them including several from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. The articles from both the BBC and Forbes of course, seem biased in favour of the record industry, but this is no surprise. I included them to show how different sources play the decision.
It took over a month but when it was all said and done, the CRIA's attempt to get the same power as it's US counterparts failed (and even in the US, that power is now being questioned). It made some considerable news online, but got little to no press on television.
The ruling essentially said that the ISP's do not have to give personal data of the file subscribers to the ISP's because the CRIA could not make a case if any files were distributed, and if the files were even authentic. When I read this I was very surprised that someone who was in Law actually got this point across. The record industry has also been swamping the P2P programs with fake copies of various popular songs to discourage file sharing, which makes this point even more accurate. How can you verify a person is sharing all this music without downloading and listening to all of them?
The concept that people are downloading files because they are shared was also proved to be false in this case. Very nice. It cannot be said for certain that someone downloaded every song that these people had shared. Or if that was even possible. Too many unknowns were brought up.
The company that was doing all this, Media Sentry was found to be providing insufficient evidence for this case (something I noticed when looking over the brief's back in February), and providing information as "hearsay".
Unfortunately the fight will go on, but the cost of getting a burden of proof against the individuals will be too much for what it's worth in my opinion. The bandwidth and time to verify all those songs will cost more than what is potentially lost by the person making the music available for download, unless it's automated (which thus has to be credible). I hope this helps plaintiffs think twice before settling in the US filesharing cases that are going on.
Also one last thing to add to this piece is that it's copyright infringement, not theft. That does not mean automatically someone loses money if they download a CD off you. How do you know they were going to buy a CD in the first place? You can't. There's no physical loss, just a potential lost sale, which has to be proven. Would the person have bought it if it wasn't available for download? How do you know they would not have been able to record it off the radio (as I once did with some of my music)?
Canada was the location of the first major nuclear reactor accident
Interesting and related sites:
The NRX Incident
Reactor Accidents: The Human Fallout
Existing wastes
Canada's Nuclear Industry and the Myth of the Peaceful Atom
I remember reading a brief excerpt from one of my old Almanacs from 1990 under the Nuclear Power Plant Accidents section. It said the following:
1952 Dec 12, Chalk River, near Ottawa, Canada: A partial meltdown of the reactor's uranium fuel core resulted after the accidental removal of four control rods. Although millions of gallons of radioactive water accumulated inside the reactor, there were no injuries.
Source: The 1990 Information Please Almanac - page 372
After doing readings about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl I came across this, but not that much. Essentially what happened was the NRX reactor, which was one of research reactors which helped development of the CANDU reactors, did not have all the control rods in time to prevent a meltdown situation. From what I'm reading, alot of it was human error, with incorrect switch numbers given causing control rods not to fall in place in time. At that point the reactor started overheating, going from 0.1MW to 80MW in a matter of seconds (the nominal limit was 20MW for the reactor and often was operated much lower). The concern of an explosion was also emment, and did occur, however no real damage or leakage was reported outside of the reactor building (in factor the reactor did not suffer complete structural failure). Normal water was used to cool the reactor and none was released into the nearby Ottawa River. The clean up took many months and the reactor was dismantled, buried/stored on CRL's property in Area A.
Five years after this accident another accident occurred at Chalk River, although not as severe, still required cleanup. This one leaked potential radioactive material into the atmosphere, although not much to cause a real concern (especially considering Chalk River's property size). For the most part there were very few issues with works being ill from the contamination. So far there's only this case reported so far, although apparently AECL was being quiet with records of individuals who were part of the clean up. If this account is true and related (which looks possible), that's still a low number of people exposed and suffering considering the amount of radiation and the magnitude of the accidents involved (I would prefer no one being exposed though and feel very sympathetic for that individual). I am still pro nuclear energy, and I'm surprised the events did not cause any real significant damage considering these were all experiments/research and how to deal with these events and situations were unknown at the time.
Interesting to note was that some of these reactors were capable of creating weapons grade plutonium, which we sold to various military outfits in the 50s and 60s. At some point we also sold NRX reactors to both Pakistan and India, with a promise that those reactors would be used for "peaceful purposes only". Interesting considering its rumoured that both countries are having an arms race of sorts (please notify me if I'm misinformed about this).
CRIA Loses it's battle to gain filesharer's personal info
Links:
The Globe and Mail
The Register
Forbes
The Toronto Star
BBC
More Articles,
Just a note about the articles: There's many of them including several from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. The articles from both the BBC and Forbes of course, seem biased in favour of the record industry, but this is no surprise. I included them to show how different sources play the decision.
It took over a month but when it was all said and done, the CRIA's attempt to get the same power as it's US counterparts failed (and even in the US, that power is now being questioned). It made some considerable news online, but got little to no press on television.
The ruling essentially said that the ISP's do not have to give personal data of the file subscribers to the ISP's because the CRIA could not make a case if any files were distributed, and if the files were even authentic. When I read this I was very surprised that someone who was in Law actually got this point across. The record industry has also been swamping the P2P programs with fake copies of various popular songs to discourage file sharing, which makes this point even more accurate. How can you verify a person is sharing all this music without downloading and listening to all of them?
The concept that people are downloading files because they are shared was also proved to be false in this case. Very nice. It cannot be said for certain that someone downloaded every song that these people had shared. Or if that was even possible. Too many unknowns were brought up.
The company that was doing all this, Media Sentry was found to be providing insufficient evidence for this case (something I noticed when looking over the brief's back in February), and providing information as "hearsay".
Unfortunately the fight will go on, but the cost of getting a burden of proof against the individuals will be too much for what it's worth in my opinion. The bandwidth and time to verify all those songs will cost more than what is potentially lost by the person making the music available for download, unless it's automated (which thus has to be credible). I hope this helps plaintiffs think twice before settling in the US filesharing cases that are going on.
Also one last thing to add to this piece is that it's copyright infringement, not theft. That does not mean automatically someone loses money if they download a CD off you. How do you know they were going to buy a CD in the first place? You can't. There's no physical loss, just a potential lost sale, which has to be proven. Would the person have bought it if it wasn't available for download? How do you know they would not have been able to record it off the radio (as I once did with some of my music)?
Canada was the location of the first major nuclear reactor accident
Interesting and related sites:
The NRX Incident
Reactor Accidents: The Human Fallout
Existing wastes
Canada's Nuclear Industry and the Myth of the Peaceful Atom
I remember reading a brief excerpt from one of my old Almanacs from 1990 under the Nuclear Power Plant Accidents section. It said the following:
1952 Dec 12, Chalk River, near Ottawa, Canada: A partial meltdown of the reactor's uranium fuel core resulted after the accidental removal of four control rods. Although millions of gallons of radioactive water accumulated inside the reactor, there were no injuries.
Source: The 1990 Information Please Almanac - page 372
After doing readings about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl I came across this, but not that much. Essentially what happened was the NRX reactor, which was one of research reactors which helped development of the CANDU reactors, did not have all the control rods in time to prevent a meltdown situation. From what I'm reading, alot of it was human error, with incorrect switch numbers given causing control rods not to fall in place in time. At that point the reactor started overheating, going from 0.1MW to 80MW in a matter of seconds (the nominal limit was 20MW for the reactor and often was operated much lower). The concern of an explosion was also emment, and did occur, however no real damage or leakage was reported outside of the reactor building (in factor the reactor did not suffer complete structural failure). Normal water was used to cool the reactor and none was released into the nearby Ottawa River. The clean up took many months and the reactor was dismantled, buried/stored on CRL's property in Area A.
Five years after this accident another accident occurred at Chalk River, although not as severe, still required cleanup. This one leaked potential radioactive material into the atmosphere, although not much to cause a real concern (especially considering Chalk River's property size). For the most part there were very few issues with works being ill from the contamination. So far there's only this case reported so far, although apparently AECL was being quiet with records of individuals who were part of the clean up. If this account is true and related (which looks possible), that's still a low number of people exposed and suffering considering the amount of radiation and the magnitude of the accidents involved (I would prefer no one being exposed though and feel very sympathetic for that individual). I am still pro nuclear energy, and I'm surprised the events did not cause any real significant damage considering these were all experiments/research and how to deal with these events and situations were unknown at the time.
Interesting to note was that some of these reactors were capable of creating weapons grade plutonium, which we sold to various military outfits in the 50s and 60s. At some point we also sold NRX reactors to both Pakistan and India, with a promise that those reactors would be used for "peaceful purposes only". Interesting considering its rumoured that both countries are having an arms race of sorts (please notify me if I'm misinformed about this).