There is currently big change going on with Canadian copyright laws that the conservative government is trying to push through. This will change the legality of many normal things people do (and its not just about file downloading). Michael Geist has written a series of articles about how it will impact everyone in day to day life.
My view of this is how big music and movies make their money. Right now if you buy a CD you can rip the CD to play on an iPod. You cannot easily do that with a movie because movie's are encrypted. The content industries want you to buy one form of a song to play on the computer, one for the iPod, one for your CD player. You will put in your music and the device will 'phone home' to make sure you have permission to play this song on a Tuesday afternoon (maybe your song license only lets you play it once a week). A bigger problem with this is when they disconnect the server that the music phones home too because the format is old (this happened with Microsoft). The songs you bought try to call home, no longer can and so now refuse to play. Too bad, buy them again in the newer format. You can't hack them either, they're encrypted and to break the encryption by this law is illegal.
The other thing is tv broadcast flags. When VHS came out there was a big lawsuit because you were able to record a movie on TV. Big media lost, you are allowed to record and save the shows. The new copyright law will now change it. With digital tv (US has now shut down all analog tv and it's coming here) it's encrypted. There is a little content flag in the signal which says if you are allowed to record or not, how many times you could watch the recording, what equipment you are allowed to use and if the recording will delete itself after a month. These are all against your current protected fair use but now the new copyright will make it illegal to break the encryption. The content industry will hide your fair use behind encryption.
The music industry will claim to maintain fair use but it will be entirely at their discretion.
Michael Geist has a page about what you can do.
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