The Savvy Boomer

Win Neil Diamond "The Very Best of Original Studio Recordings"

COLUMBIA/LEGACY RECORDINGS PROUD TO RELEASE

THE VERY BEST OF NEIL DIAMOND - THE ORIGINAL STUDIO RECORDINGS

Choose one song from the 23 on the track listing below, send me an Email before Dec 11 and if you choose the winning song, Columbia/Legacy Recordings will send you the CD. (TheSavvyBoomer will randomly choose the winner in case of ties)

Vancouver based University wins world pipe band championship

The Simon Fraser University pipe (as in bag pipes) band won its 6th title at the world championship in Glasgow Scotland.  How a Canadian university pipe band ever got to be a world class contender and beat out some 200 other bands is beyond me but it's just one of those weird things that make Canada such a unique country to live in, regardless of how much I bitch about some things.

The party may be over for Canadian downloaders

Canadians who download copyrighted material from peer to peer sites have been ignored for the past few years.  While it was never encouraged in Canada, it was also known that there were no real laws in place to prevent it from happening.  The only complaints came from US distributors of music and movies who said that Canada was amongst the many nations known as having lax laws to prevent copyright theft.

But that may all change within the next few days as new laws with fines for downloading illegally are set to be passed in Parliament. 

I have 3 observations on this:

1. How is it going to be policed?
2. There are a lot of peer to peer sites that are run outside North America that only the downloaders know about (or so I'm told.)  Only a lot of sleuthing will get law enforcement officials in there.
3. Peer to peer is just one way to acquire files illegally.  If these are throttled down, doesn't it make sense that downloaders will just start using other services which are off-shore and don't use peer to peer thereby making it virtually impossible to know who is uploading and downloading files?  I would think the sites in Russia and other Eastern European countries that sell songs for about a dime each are going to be happy with laws like this.  After all if it doesn't bother you morally, would you rather pay $2 for an album or $12?  All these new laws really do is attack the peer to peers and I believe that they might just be the tip of the iceberg.

I agree that something has to be done but I don't think this is it.