Future of Canadian AMVs in Danger

[NME]

If we have caps on what we can do on the internet we won't be able to share sources with each other, distribute betas, or even upload to Youtube in some cases. This will not only effect people who make AMVs, but musicians, digital artists, researchers and scientists who use their home connections to look at materials online. 25 GB is nothing when Comcast in the United States has set their caps around at 250 GB for the past 2 years. There is basically no difference in the network infrastructure in either country (same ADSL2 systems and DOCSIS 3 cable systems) so there is no reason to limit Canada's bandwidth usage under the guise that the networks are congested, as they are not. Even if they were, the burden is on the ISP to upgrade their infrastructure to better serve their larger client base instead of limiting people's internet usage behaviour (which is what they want to do with this new UBB scheme, they say so in the appeal to the CRTC). Canadians won't be able to enjoy media other than what's on their TVs if their internet caps are so low. A hobbyist could potentially be charged for putting his work up on the internet because he went over his limit. How is this supporting Canadian artists? It's not, it's stifling them and what they can experience culturally. This is behaviour and thought control authorized by our government agencies. Thanks Canada.

Comcast is making the same moves down south as well. Netflix is likely going to lose all of Universal's TV and movie library at the end of their contract with the studio as Universal has just merged with Comcast. This is man's greed manifest in its most vile form imo, because it is limiting our freedom of expression, our ability to run our own lives without watching TV at a set time and thought. Our governments let them get away with this because they profit as well.

Content creation needs unlimited bandwidth. If you need more paint for your work you buy more paint, bandwidth and its use in obtaining and sharing sources and finished products is far too important to content creation in modern media to be held back in any way by man's greed. If we are to be charged in a fair UBB system we should each pay $5 dollars to get on a network and 3-6 cents per GB we consume. This is enough to turn a profit at current prices and as bandwidth prices lower (they do every year as network capacity increases) a GB will eventually cost less than 1/100th of a cent to transfer.

If this regulation stays around we'll all still be paying 2 dollars per gigabyte.

Usage caps on bandwidth are asinine. Data doesn't degrade their machines the more I run through it, all it does is cost them slightly more and congest the network if I do it during peak times. The service is on all the time whether I am actively browsing or downloading or not.

This is the future. It's time we oust the dinosaur fuckers who are ruining it with their outdated un-evolved cash greed trip. That shit is childish and is gonna make us all suffer the more we accept it. Cellphone bill overages are already terrible in both countries and will only get worse unless there is raucous public outcry.

[NME]

I flatly refuse to pay overage charges, every Canadian consumer should. It costs less than a cent for an ISP to transfer a gigabyte of data. This is robbery.

x2

I'm facepalming right now, particularly as most of the content I download is perfectly legal and paid for dearly. You'd think they would be going in the other direction.

I'd like to point out, by the way, that Canada's centralization of the telecom industry is creepier than just having expensive internet. It's frightening how much of the entire communication and media (including internet, print, television, radio etc.) is centralized with something like 2.5 corporations. The CRTC being in bed with them doesn't surprise me.

It's the same anywhere man, the corporations control what we see and read and have no interest but their own and their partner's own in mind. Canadians pay the most money in the western world for internet, and have bar-none the lowest caps. Romanian telecom offers unlimited 50mbps internet for about 8 dollars American a month. Canada could very well develop a government-funded fibre optic network to take the power out of the hands of the corporations and put it into the hands of an even more corrupt, greedy, poorly run corporation that is blatantly kowtowing to American business interest.

The NFB just released a whole lot of their back catalog online, that's hardly a use to Canadians with a 25 GB useage cap and 3 other people in the house sharing the same connection.

[Otohiko]

It's the same anywhere man, the corporations control what we see and read and have no interest but their own and their partner's own in mind.

Yeah, but I was pointing out that the level to which it's centralized in Canada is actually more than probably anywhere else short of places where such media/communications is completely under state control. And which of these is worse is yet debatable.

Otherwise yeah, this is just retarded. We're at a point where our service quality is approaching the level below that in the third world, at a price exponentially higher. The sad thing is, we still either have to pay up or be stuck without internet/phone/whatever. The lack of options is what makes it disturbing.

This, combined with the recent dumbfuck moves by the industry's copyright bodies, are indeed beginning to seriously encroach on the ability of any sort of creative endeavours to survive in Canada, unless they have official recognition of the regulatory bodies involved. In the rush to protect Canadian content, the CRTC is now at a point where it is shutting down any sort of communication or creation that does not fall in the interest of officially-vested businesses. The net result is that anyone doing anything creative in public may soon need an official stamp to do so.

[NME]

If the corporations control the state, it's all corporate control in my eyes.

When art is criminal, criminals are artists.

[Moonlight Soldier]

I flatly refuse to pay overage charges, every Canadian consumer should. It costs less than a cent for an ISP to transfer a gigabyte of data. This is robbery.

x2

I'm facepalming right now, particularly as most of the content I download is perfectly legal and paid for dearly. You'd think they would be going in the other direction.

I'd like to point out, by the way, that Canada's centralization of the telecom industry is creepier than just having expensive internet. It's frightening how much of the entire communication and media (including internet, print, television, radio etc.) is centralized with something like 2.5 corporations. The CRTC being in bed with them doesn't surprise me.

Yea. I wanted to write about this but it was pointed out our parent company uhh...one of those corporations Oto is talking about -_-

[Fall_Child42]

Yea. I wanted to write about this but it was pointed out our parent company uhh...one of those corporations Oto is talking about -_-

YOU TOLD ME IT WASN'T LIKE THIS.
YOU SAID MY VIEWS ON MEDIA WERE GROSSLY EXAGGERATED.

[Otohiko]

Yeah -__-

I am honestly surprised by the reversal of fortunes for Netflix btw. They almost singlehandedly killed the traditional rental market, but now they're actually in quite a bind because of what's been mentioned above. That could also be of consequence to many AMVers. Likewise, this could begin to really damage services like Steam. While I totally support both local video and game retailers, the trouble is that one of the big, big advantages of online services like Netflix or Steam is that they give easy access to a lot of niche content, just as easily as mainstream content. This is increasingly untrue of retailers; over the last few years these have likewise increasingly come under the control of major media corporations, and their product selections have become governed by ease of distributions. Which means that what's on the shelves is generally the mainstream, mass print stuff. Tracking down niche films, music or games is tough without the internet. While killing the traffic limits won't stop online-ordering services, it will certainly put content delivery back - way back - to something like 2001 standards.

[NME]

The internet killed the rental market. Physical media is a dead business. Kids today are growing up without ever having owned a CD. If Canada wants collective groups of pirates to engage in swap meets to exchange data with each other because they can't download it on their own we will do that. Our populations live in large centralized cities and we have ample public spaces where we could set up ad-hoc networks for an afternoon of sharing. Pirate networks will be formed if the man takes our private access down.

Renting a server and buying hard drives that you fill up with that server's connection in order to ship the drives full back to your house is probably the cheapest way to gain access to things in a quick amount of time under this new system without incurring ridiculous overcharges.

Digital distribution is clearly the future and everyone can see this. A government that passes regulations that could cause my 10 dollar 8 gigabyte steam game to cost me 16 dollars to download has nothing of my best interests in mind. A government that would pass a regulation that may discourage computer users from having automatic updates enabled and regularly installed on their machines clearly gives no fuck. Windows updates aren't small, and videogames keep getting bigger and bigger. We've been allowed to download music all we want because the CRIAA imposed a tariff on all of our blank CDs to supposedly offset the damage of piracy to the music industry (aka record company profiteers stealing money from people who want to back up their baby photos). Now that it's clear that the music industry is not suffering in anything but sales of outdated pieces of plastic there is little reason for us to believe a word of what CTV, Global, Chorus, or the corporate media tells us about this issue. I've seen more lies printed in major national newspapers about this story in the past week that I wonder how often the newspaper lies to me about other stuff.

This will cause more people to pirate and fewer people to buy in Canada, they are basically putting a nail in the coffin of a legitimate internet marketplace in Canada and shooting the next generation of Canadians in the face. This causes more reliance on fossil fuels, more reliance on old technology.

The morons. They'll make Canada a technological laughingstock.

[Pwolf]

The morons. They'll make Canada a technological laughingstock.

Well...

[Moonlight Soldier]

The morons. They'll make Canada a technological laughingstock.

Well...

Kicks you.