Ever since Best Buy came to Canada, I have been concerned.

You see, they bought out all-Canadian Futureshop and you would have had a hard time convincing me that it was not the intent of Best Buy to create their own stores in as many markets as possible and then begin closing down Futureshop stores, in order to get rid of the generally higher-paid commissioned sales staff and instead simply having the minimum-wage, undertrained drones that staff many Best Buy locations. I still think it might be what they are working into… but we’ll just set that aside for a moment.

An Op-Ed piece in the Vancouver Sun written by Ron Wilson, Best Buy’s senior vice-president of merchandising, has shown me that Best Buy may not be entirely evil. The article is about copyright and the current issues regarding the Canadian DMCA, and how it has pitted Industry Minister Jim Prentice and the current Conservative government supported by a bunch of bootlicking, greedy content producing companies (not the artists or producers themselves, but those who have appointed themselves to a position in charge of content) against most of the in-the-know Canadian populace, numerous artists, and big Canadian retailers and telecommunications companies.
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By now, we have all (or at least those interested) seen the outcry over the government’s attempt to slip a new American-style DMCA-like copyright law into the Canadian law books. I would go into my take and the whole thing but I think I will save it for some time when I finally get my blog page back up and running.

Right now, though, I thought it was amusing to read a quote from a news release from ACTRA (for those of you who don’t know, that is the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists), expressing their “outrage” over the delay of the bill after Minister Jim Prentice found himself deluged with questions and complaints about his new legislation.

The entire article is here. But, the most significant quote which I found amusing was the opening line:

“The government’s about-face decision to abandon the scheduled introduction of new Copyright legislation is a detriment to Canada’s artists, and a hijacking of the policy process by a vocal minority.”

A vocal minority.

That’s what the voters in this country are, according to the “industry”.

The last I checked, ACTRA had 21000 members – and it doesn’t take much searching to find that their membership is far from unanimous in supporting the ACTRA position. Disregarding ANY other people who are concerned about this, we can look at the facebook group “Fair Copyright for Canada” and make a comparison. The group has 25588 members as of this writing.

Taking the facebook group and ACTRA’s membership numbers alone, there are more people in favour of avoiding the USA-DMCA-like billl than supporting it.

So – doesn’t that mean that effectively ACTRA is nothing more than a vocal minority smaller than the very same group they claim is not making a valid claim because they are a minority?
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