Digital Copyright Canada

2010-06-11: I sent a letter this afternoon to my Member of Provincial parliament for Ottawa South, who happens to be Premier Dalton McGuinty. I copied it to my federal MP, as well as to Andrea Horwath, Leader of Ontario’s New Democrats, and Tim Hudak, Leader of the Ontario PC Party.

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Update 2010-07-29: I have sent an additional letter to Mr. McGuinty.

Thank you for your letter of July 27, 2010, in response to the letter I sent on June 11, 20101. I hope that you will reconsider the response, which was to say that it would be inappropriate for you to comment on a federal piece of legislation.

I forgot to include a link to the FAQ on why I disagree with what CMEC has been asking for.

I met with Justin Trudeau at his office at 625 Faillon Street in Montréal, Québec, from approximately 15:00 to 16:00 on Monday July 19'th. My wife attended as she was interested to meet Mr. Trudeau. The conversation was primarily about Copyright, and when it was nearing 16:00 it was Rina and not one of Mr. Trudeau's staffers that had to remind us that the office was closing when it seemed we might head off into other topics (Census, patenting of life, ....).

A release from the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) indicates that on Tuesday July 20, a group of public interest organizations, represented by Sean Flynn, Associate Director of PIJIP, will file a complaint alleging that U.S. trade policy in the Obama Administration violates international human rights obligations.

In this case the issue is the promotion of policies restricting access to affordable medications around the world. The report is also abused to promote other highly controversial policies which go beyond or contradict internationally negotiated treaties in areas of patent, copyright, trademark and related rights.

Interesting statistics from Copyright and Technology Blog :

[...] academic research into DRM and other rights technologies in the United States has diminished to virtually nil.

(For example, a search of IEEE shows that of all digital rights-related research papers published from 2008 to the present, 40% were from China, 27% were from the rest of Asia, 20% were from Europe, and less than 4% were from the United States. Spain by itself had more activity than the US.)

Some great news from New Zealand via Paul Matthews of the NZ Computer Society.

Michael Geist has published his submission online which touches many different areas. I'm in full agreement with this submission.

I was thinking about this last night after reading another "but we have to have the C-32 approach to TPMs for the creators to get paid" article, and think I found a way to explain my thinking.

Let's divide Canadians into 4 groups based on their ability to bypass TPMs and their respect for copyright law :

	Can bypass TPMs	Can't bypass TPMs
Respect Copyright law	Engineers	Comsumers
Don't respect copyright law	Pirates	Wannabe pirates

A CBC News article documents yet another failed attempt to misapply technology to solve unrelated legal issue. I only wish this government would do evidence based policy, and look at when specific technologies have failed to solve legal problems elsewhere (IE: access controls in copyright in the USA has been a failure, and yet a far worse version is in Bill C-32). In the case of DMCA TPMs it wasn't a small sample, but a failed experiment committed against the entire country.

In an earlier article describing my limited participation in the Digital Economy consultation I indicated that I wouldn't have the time to make a formal submission. This fact was hilighted in a flattering article by Laurel L. Russwurm, who did make a formal submission, so I thought I would write about why I didn't allocate the time.

The deadline for ideas and submissions on Canada’s digital economy strategy has been extended until midnight, Tuesday, July 13

I don't think I will have the time to make a formal submission. I have instead started to post to the ideas forum. If you agree with these ideas, please vote them up. Please also add comments.

• Protect end-to-end design principle in new communications technology.
  
• Regulate usage of technology in the correct laws
  
• Protect Information Technology property rights
  
• Adopt policy similar to 1991 EU directive on computer programs
  
• Improve competition policy, promotion and enforcement