Proposed Canadian Copyright Legislation C-61 Is Not Enough: We Must Save the Zoopraxiscope!

Notice anything familiar about this disc?

The Zoopraxiscope was invented by Eadweard Muybridge around 1879. Like the much beloved, and oft-fogotten, thaumatrope, it was one of the forerunners of today's film and video industry - it has, in fact, been considered the first movie projector. Interestingly, however, a Zoopraxiscope disc itself would not look too much out of place on your DVD or CD shelf today.

Played, the disc would give you a film of a couple of seconds' length. Each and every film made was an epic, no doubt. Although, in all fairness, it would be reasonable to admit that character development may not be a strength of the Zoopraxiscope.

Unlike so many pundits discussing the proposed bill C-61 in Canada, who are all philistines and short-sightedly and small-mindedly scathing in their criticism of the bill, I am proposing taking this unquestionably brilliant piece of legislation further.

Bill C-61 should be extended. We need to ban all media and communications technology... other than the Zoopraxiscope!

Think of the benefits of this strengthened legislation:

1) Saving the Zoopraxiscope industry. Speaking plainly, Zoopraxiscopes have been losing market share for about 130 years. Why force a distribution model to change once it has has already been invented?
2) A renaissance of the record store. To watch a film of an hour and a half, you'd have to purchase approximately 2,700 Zoopraxiscope discs. Yes, it is slightly more convenient to download a movie, but this is not about convenience. It's clearly about something else.
3) With no internet(s), computers, video cameras, or any other digital technology, DRM would be redundant. We could put razor-wire, armed guards, attack dogs and mined fields around the Zoopraxiscope plants to make sure no one broke in and printed 2,700 disc pirated bootlegs late at night, and we could reinstate the death penalty, applying it to teenagers caught sharing the discs among themselves.

It's a win, win, win situation!

Unlike the current version of C-61, the Zoopraxiscope modification of this legislation would truly be, in the words of Industry Minister Jim Prentice, "a made-in-Canada approach that balances the needs of Canadian consumers and copyright owners, promoting culture, innovation and competition in the digital age."

(*Zoopraxiscope images from WIkipedia, under Creative Commons License.)