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Loading ...Where is that “buy me now” button for Copyright?
Much of the copyright debate reads like fiction. People supposedly find content on the Internet which has a “buy me now” button and a “take without paying” button, and they choose the latter. The non-fiction version of this story is very different. For the vast majority of content which people can acquire illegally on the Internet, there is no way to purchase the same thing legally. It is very hard to share the “moral outrage” that some entertainment industry lobbiests have been exhibiting, especially since they made deliberate business choices which caused their problems to be far worse.
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(6 votes, average: 7.83 out of 10) Loading ...Copyright: locks, levies, lawsuits or licensing? Part1: locks
Copyright is merely a series of activities which someone can do with human creativity that requires permission of the copyright holder to do legally. If you do one of these things without permission, the copyright holder has the right to sue you. (Lawsuits)
Years ago traditional copyright added an exception to the general rule which suggested that you no longer needed permission, as long as you made a payment that was decided by a government body — in our case, the Copyright Board of Canada. (Levies)
Recently some people have thought that digital locks would be a good substitute for copyright, whether permission or payment/levy based.
Which is best: locks, levies (part 2) or lawsuits (part 3)? Or maybe what you want to do is licensing (Part 4)? The only good answer is: it depends. Read the rest of this entry »
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Rush, Ayn Rand, and the “Conservative” party’s copyright bill
On Jun 12′th there were two important events in my life. Early in the day the “Conservative” party tabled their copyright bill C-61, and later that evening I was in Montreal watching Rush as part of their Snakes and Arrows tour. One of the things I love about Rush is the deeper thinking that their lyrics encourage, and in this case I saw many parallels between some of the lyrics and the contents of the Copyright bill.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...A first look at Canada’s “Born in the USA” Copyright bill.
Having a chance for a quick read of Bill C-61, I can say that it will likely be decades before we fully understand how this bill will be interpreted by the courts. Contrary to what the Minister claimed, this bill reduces certainty in the marketplace, not increases it.
The largest portion of this bill is a Canadian DMCA, which is to say an implementation of the 2 1996 WIPO treaties and an ISP liability regime. The ISP liability regime is similar to the Liberal Bill C-60 from 2005 in that it codifies the current voluntary regime used by ISPs which is notice-and-notice.
The 2 1996 WIPO treaties are well understood to be a policy laundering of the 1995 National Information Infrastructure (NII) implementation bill, a Clinton/Gore era bill which was largely authored through consultations with the then successful copyright holders who saw new media and the Internet as a threat. Read the rest of this entry »
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...The Two Open Sources
This last month I have encountered a common misunderstanding pertaining to Linux and open source. Many representatives of corporate entities equate open source, and Linux for that matter, with the dvds you find taped to magazines in your local bookstore.
They’re right. But there’s another open source. That’s the Linux and set of applications that are hardened and delivered as part of an enterprise scale distribution. What’s the difference?
It’s all about supportability. Commercial grade linux and open source have established roadmaps, have comprehensive support infrastructures behind them and are stable releases that are updated on a regular but not rapid interval.
Community distros typically have new releases every six months or so, and often see significant updates each week. We get to see amazing innovation in the community distros but you’d have to be wacky to run your business on them. That’s what commercial grade distros are for.
So please do give Linux and open source a try. Please also recognize that the commercial and community distributions are built with different design goals and different audiences in mind. Both bring you freedom of choice and amazing capability.
Until next time, peace.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...51’st State: It’s US vs U.S. in the battle for Canadian Sovereignty
Gordon Duggan at Appropriation Art has published a comic (PDF) about Canadian Copyright revision. It is a classic battle of good vs. evil of comic proportions where the “Evil Emissaries of American Interests try to suppress the Fantastic Freedom of Expression Fighters”.
The cast of characters is somehow familiar.
Evil Emissaries (Or just misinformed?): Harper, Bush, Prentice, Henderson, McTeague, Wilkins, Feinstein / Cronyn, Schwarzenegger, Glickman, Frith, Oda
Fantastic Freedom Fighters: Angus, Doctorow, Geist, Knopf, Murray, Page, McOrmond
The story is full of links to websites, so click away and learn more. I know I found some out-of-touch stuff from industry lobbiest — err — Liberal MP Dan McTeague which I hadn’t read before.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Dan McTeague wants gas prices down, copyright prices up?
I have had a Google Alerts for Dan McTeague for a few months, since I heard he was promoting a form of policy counterfeiting by confusing counterfeiting, commercial copyright piracy, non-commercial illegal sharing, patent, trademark, and other quite different areas of law. Most of the alerts talk about gas prices, and how he believes they should be lower.
This got me to thinking about the parallels between energy policy and copyright policy, and how Mr. McTeague, MP for Pickering-Scarborough East and the Liberal Consumer Affairs Critic, seems to not yet have an adequate understanding of these issues.
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...New media broadcasting online consultation: What is new media broadcasting?
The following is my first submission to the New Media Broadcasting online consultation. I spent a few hours on the site this afternoon and made other contributions, but this was my main one.
What is new media broadcasting?
In order to discuss new media broadcasting, we need to first discuss what is actually new about this media. I believe there are a few key changes: ownership/control of tools, design criteria of communications networks, and new methods of production/distribution/funding.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Industry Minister Jim Prentice sidesteps question on counterfeit treaty and Copyright bill
If you look up counterfeit in Wikipedia it starts with, “A counterfeiting is an imitation that is made usually with the intent to deceptively represent its content or origins.” What would you call a treaty that is being negotiated in secret, needed a Wikileaks leak to get past the fact that Access to Information requests were getting blacked out pages, is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and yet has contents which have little to nothing to do with counterfeiting?
I think we have a treaty where its very title seems to have the intent to deceptively represent its content and origins.
Within parliament we appear to have a member that is trying to get at the truth about this government counterfeiting. Charlie Angus, the NDP’s digital issues critic and the sitting MP that seems to best understand digital issues, had yet another exchange with the Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. This exchange included this counterfeit treaty and the fact the Copyright bill was not to be tabled today.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Why Business Needs to Support Net Neutrality
There has been a great deal of discourse on the subject of Net Neutrality. Google has been highly supportive of this issue, including a letter to the US House of Representatives from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Last week, NDP MP Charles Angus introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-552 to protect net neutrality to prohibit telecom providers from interfering with traffic that flows over their networks, other than in specific instances. This issue has been covered well by the wonderful folks at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (www.cippic.ca)
It’s my position that all businesses need to care about net neutrality because such filtering could impact any business’ ability to transact or create opportunity using the internet. If packet shaping is used by Internet Service Providers today to control use of P2P style applications, what guarantee exists to prevent such packet-shaping being used to provide preferential treatment to some web sites at the expense of others. What assurance exists that some content or entire site will not be filtered and blocked by arbitrary ISP action?
Certainly we must have initiatives to stop the spread of child pornography or the advocation of terrorist action, but I’m not convinced that placing such controls in the hands of ISPs is the complete answer.
There has also been talk of a tiered internet where depending on what you pay controls what you can post and what you can receive. That goes against the premise of the web as a whole and also has the potential to negatively impact our ability as a country to create and grow new businesses, since new businesses won’t have the funding to pay for preferential access.
Net neutrality in the end benefits commerce and I encourage you to support these initiatives.
Until next time, peace
Ross
