by SHANE SINNOTT

There’s a lot afoot these days, compadres, in the world of downloading stuff for free, and it seems that we might all start getting in a little trouble for it. As I write this, Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice was about to, and then maybe was not about to, introduce new copyright legislation that contains all sorts of total-horseshit features, like fining you $500 for each copyrighted song you download and making transferring certain CDs to your iPod illegal. WTF? It’s a weak-kneed attempt to emulate the dreaded Digital Millennium Copyright Act that U.S. citizens have been blessed with since 1996. This is the legislation that lets record labels sue college students and single mothers for $200K for being caught with full Kazaa folders, a practice which Canadians have been thankfully free from until now.

The law, then, according to the dailies, is centred around this $500 fine per song stuff (there’s no law against music downloading in Canada right now, FYI) and it was supposed to be introduced to the legislature on June 4. Since then, Minister Prentice and the ruling Conservatives have come down with a well-deserved case of pussyitus, and are delaying it a week, to right around the time when this column should be in your hot little hands. Fortunately, it looks like nothing is going to pass before Parliament’s recess, so at the very least we’ll all have one final summer of hassle-free downloading before the curtain falls—like the summer of love, except way, way lamer. For more info, check out the advocacy site www.faircopyrightforcanada.ca, where you can find out stuff like the fact that Bob Rae, that commie, is calling for “open debate” on the issue, and that Jim Prentice and his cronies are wasting time scrubbing his Wikipedia page for references to the new law. In the meantime, you might want to begin making a habit of protecting yourself from being sued. This article is a good starting point: tinyurl.com/2swhlr. It lays out the basics of using software and services like Peerguardian and BTGuard.