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Loading ...Copyright Q&A with Tom King, NDP candidate for Guelph
The latest I have read is that by-elections for Guelph, Westmount–Ville-Marie, and Saint Lambert will be called on July 20 with a vote set for Monday, September 8. Those of us that consider fair copyright to be an important election issue are already excited by the candidacy of Tom King, a celebrated Canadian author, broadcaster, and University of Guelph professor (Read his “About me” for details — you will very likely already know of him)
Mr King has indicated he will make copyright fairness an issue during the by-election, and has already announced an event in Toronto on July 24, 2008 to meet with regional artists, activists and academics who are opposed to the Conservatives’ Bill C-61.
The following is my Q&A with him.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Copyright Q&A with Michael Byers, presumptive NDP candidate for Vancouver Center
A Hill Times article NDP’s ’star’ candidate Byers sets sights on Vancouver Centre describes how a best-selling author and academic, Michael. Byers, is seeking the nomination in that riding. I decided to do a written interview with Mr. Byers on copyright, included below. It looks like Vancouver Center will be an important riding to watch for those of us interested in copyright.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Copyright: locks, levies, lawsuits or licensing? Part 3: lawsuits
In this series we have been talking about three ways of enforcing copyright: locks (part 1), levies (part 2) and lawsuits. In the future I will clarify an alternative to enforcement which is licensing the specific usage.
In part 1 I stated that 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.
For a variety of reasons, however, many copyright holders are not happy with this situation. They keep asking the government to make copyright “stronger” by requiring permission for an ever-growing number of activities, for an ever-growing amount of time, but they are not wanting to actually sue people who infringe copyright. Sometimes copyright holders want to scapegoat someone other than the infringer, such as the rhetoric around blaming so-called “enablers” which are most often the providers of multi-purpose technology or services, or they want someone else to do all the enforcement.
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Copyright: locks, levies, lawsuits or licensing? Part 2: levies
I have expanded this discussion to include licensing, with this being the obvious option that doesn’t get discussed. Sometimes instead of trying to use locks (part 1), levies or lawsuits (part 3) to enforce a specific business model, that using an alternative licensing mechanism would work better.
I covered the topic of levies before on this blog with an article titled “Analyzing when copyright levies are a good idea, and when they are a very bad idea.“. In this article I spoke about what are called “compulsory licenses” where a copyright holder can no longer require permission for an activity, but where a royalty fee is imposed. I gave a suggested test for the extreme situation that warrants such an exception to copyright, and tried to apply this test across a few different proposals (The Songwriters Association of Canada proposal that I support, and the Creators’ Copyright Coalition proposal which I strongly reject).
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(Rate This Article) 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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(5 votes, average: 9.2 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)? 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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(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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