We recognize the importance of cryptography for personal privacy, and for the privacy of businesses. It will be our goal to ensure no laws are passed which would limit what you can do with encrypted material or compell you to decrypt or hand over passwords, such as email or social networking passwords.
Blank CDs and DVDs represent an important tool for new artists to sell their music at concerts and events. However they, along with the general public, are charged 19 cents for each CD or DVD. This money is divided among major artists based on sales, not actual levels of piracy. As a result new artists just starting out are both unfairly taxed and denied access to funds from the levy. We believe this is both structurally unfair to new artists and a cash grab by the major labels. This corporate welfare must end.
The following policies have been approved by the Political Council and will be sent to the membership to be voted on:
-We will seek to abolish the copyright levy.
The bundling of services with hardware has created artificial barriers to entry in a number of markets in the last decade. To ensure that innovation is possible and to improve competition we would aim to introduce a requirement that the providers of bundled services, software and hardware products price and offer each component individually as well as in a bundle.
We will treat locking of electronic devices, whether the locking of software to hardware or hardware to a service, as an anti-competitive act.
The following policies have been approved by the Political Council and will be sent to the membership to be voted on:
-We will introduce a requirement that the providers of bundled services, computer software and hardware, price and offer each component individually as well as in a bundle.
The following policies have been approved by the Political Council and will be sent to the membership to be voted on:
-An Open Source Action Plan will be implemented across federal government departments and will be promoted to other Canadian provincial and municipal governments.
-The Action Plan will encourage the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), saving money where practical and economically viable.
-Any third party contractors will not retain any rights or ownership over any source code from a government project.
-All source code will be released under an open source license as well.
-Additionally, to give back to the *nix community from which we draw on for an OS as well as other FOSS communities, we will hire and retain a number of full time programmers to work solely with the intention of giving back to the community.