Foreign tyranny in action: Canada's 20-year copyright extensions

Tr*mp's 20-year copyright extensions are naked foreign coercion, pure and simple, and must be annulled

The Canadian public hates copyright extensions, with good reason, for they fence off parts of the public domain from its owners, namely us. It is truly amazing that the Trudeau government thought they were entitled to set aside our own Copyright Act and allow Tr*mp to bully them into accepting twenty-year copyright extensions as part of his "new NAFTA": blatant coercion, performed in public.

And yet Section 1 of the 1960 UN Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples is unambiguous: "The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights".

The coercive takeover of Canada's copyright law by the U.S. is exactly that: subjection of Canadians to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.

Section 2 goes on to state that "all peoples... freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." Copyright law is closely intertwined with economic, social and cultural development.

https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/206145/files/A_RES_1514%28XV%29-EN.pdf?ln=en

Back in 1960, Canada voted for this resolution and has been bound by it ever since. Therefore the Trudeau government was acting beyond its powers in allowing a foreign autocrat to override our original Copyright Act and replace it with something dictated by outsiders.

It is appalling and completely unacceptable that Canadians should be forced by our own government to wait until 2044 to see our public domain titles of 2024, or until 2043 to see the titles of 2023. This cultural vandalism will affect all Canadians now and in the future. The time to act is now. We owe this to ourselves and to our descendants.

And we owe to our politicians a sharp reminder that they are in Parliament to serve us, not themselves, and certainly not foreign powers. They must repeal these extensions.