Apparently, John Bennett, who styles himself Communications Director of the Green Party, threatened a blogger, a lefty bloger as it happens, with a suit for slander unless that blogger took down the video above.

Yo, John, there really is nothing dumber than threatening a blogger with legal action…It can give you a nasty virus.

I phoned John Bennett on his cell. He stated this is a doctored interview (though not who doctored it) and then hung up on me before I could confirm his quote. He also stated that the interview was obtained illegally.

Listen and judge for yourself.

Meanwhile, Steve Taylor, who I have to say I trust a lot more than “John Bennett” confirms the authenticity of the tape.

Here’s the deal John, don’t threaten bloggers with legal action if you want to bury an embarrassing quote. Don’t try to tell people that “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” is in the habit of doctoring tapes. You look dumb and you embarrass your leader and your party. It is pretty clear May said that Canadians were stupid. Deal with it.

(Huge hattip to SDA)

Update: Last night as I tried to post this 4000 people had watched the video, as of (9:00 Pacific this morning 10,400 people had seen it. Way to go John.

Update II: TVO confirms the tape is intact.

Update III: 14,956 views at 9:24 PM Pacific and the Communications genius for the Green Party, John Bennett, has apologized but managed to refer to Leftdog as a Conservative blogger twice on Mike Duffy. Dolt.

Pet Shop Boys, Liza Minnelli: “Rent”. The 80’s were very strange indeed.

But the real danger lies in the details. There are anti-DRM circumvention measures and “ISPs would be obligated to inform subscribers when a complaint has been launched against the consumer by a the owner of a copyright, however they would also be obliged to track that user’s Internet activity for six months in case the information became necessary for legal proceedings.”

The Globe and Mail article makes no mention of the current media levy on all recordable media nor does it mention the private sharing right which has protected Canadians from the lunacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Two things are evident: first, now is the time to grab those torrents and MP3s. Second, hard drive swapping, thumb drives and such like have apparently slipped under the technological radar. Sneaker nets are very powerful when it comes to swapping big files.

One other thing is evident as well, the CPC has no spine at all when it comes to facing down the dying copyright interests in the United States.

18 minutes of your life. Malcolm Gladwell (who could have a career as a stand-up). Spaghetti sauce.

via Bob Lefsetz who runs it about music. But it is a very much bigger point.

Jim Griffin is a smart guy and Warners is smart to hire him. Of course they would have been brilliant had they adopted the “music as service model” a week after Napster was founded which would be, well nearly a decade ago.

Fresh from his double triumph of accusing Christians of wanting to slaughter non-Christians to bring forth the Messiah and reviving the old “Jews control the media” meme you’d think Cherniak would try the think before you type method. You’d think wrong.

The punch line, Jason, is that Kinsella’s faux Nazi hunting, brute ignorance and willingness to use what he believed was a Holocaust survivor to boost his bogus arguments has been exposed.

I am hoping that Kinsella learns something from his humiliation. For example, he might learn that calling people “bigots” or “crypto-Nazis” without a shred of proof can turn out badly. He might learn that using fake names, sock puppets, agent provocateurs in sting operations is not a sign of bravery but rather of craven cowardice. And, with luck, Kinsella might even clue into the fact that the real enemy of the Jews and the West are not a bunch of neo-Nazi losers in Mum’s basement - rather it is militant Islam.

One of the pleasures of living in my particular leafy suburb is that virtually none of the merchants feel called upon to play music to enhance my shopping experience. KMG has pointed out to me that one of the reasons popular music is losing its value is it has become ubiquitous.

But Steyn brings it home by pointing out that mere ubiquity is not quite the same as having the band of the week blasted at you as you seek to buy socks.

It is very clear under the Copyright Act that I, as the creator of my work, am most certainly entitled to freely reproduce my work yet the CPCC provides no process whatsoever for independent musicians and composers.

This levy is simply set up as a cash cow for the big music industry; not musicians and composers for in age of home studios and the internet, the big music industry is simply a bloodsucker. I am paying the music industry to put my own music independently and getting none of it back!

Thieves. Also, the thinking behind this ruling would seem to also qualify personal computers and phones or indeed any device that plays audio as being subject to this levy. comment at the globe and mail

Hello, this is where the bytes meet the atoms and one wins.

I have a three hundred gig disk in my beaten up old computer. And a one gig thumb drive ($12.99, the Source and you get a free golf game) for quick copying of tunes - and a thousand other things.

The game is over for people who think that the physical world and intellectual property have any intersection any more. And, well, yes, you could impose a levy on my hard drive and my thumb drive and Ipods. But, er, what about cell phones or digital cameras or the 2GB stick of flash memory which holds my cheap camera’s shots or could hold a couple of movies?

Copyright law and that which flows from it presumed a complicated process of reproduction; bytes chage everything as Negroponte pointed out a decade ago. The quicker people who make music, movies, software, games and all else digital accept this the faster they can turn their minds to how to make a living when copying is the norm rather than the exception.

And, yo, CBC guys…you know that youth market you are chasing at night? Well they already are listening to streaming audio…us old guys, until now, not so much. But, hey, an all Baroque station out of the Netherlands vs Laurie Brown playing what she found on her iPod? You make it all too easy.

It is rather pointless to note that the current, no doubt geriatric, audience is going to be looking for alternatives. And, of course, the ‘net provides them. In spades. From music downloads to streaming audio.

If the CBC actually had a bit of intelligence it would have moved incrementally to increase its audience by retaining the existing audience and recruiting more. Instead it is simply taking the current service and scrapping it.

Which is sad.