Digital Copyright Canada

There are a few issues that have become an election issue in Australia and have not been as high on the Canadian election agenda. One is the Internet. Australians are rightly concerned about the next generation of high speed Internet.
Other issues on the Australian agenda not seen in Canada:
fishing
camping
shooting (ok... so a few common issues)
boiling the billy (?)
...and of course, the deadly flying foxes.

Sounding Out! has an interesting post about how law (Arizona's anti-illegal-immigration law) and sound (sonic profiling) can be used to target undocumented workers and make them subject to deportation, police harassment, and criminalization - and how remixers and other performers are using sound to fight back.

The Daily Finance has an article on how the Library of Congress' recent ruling allows the circumvention of digital locks in order to use ebook text-to-speech features. Kevin Smith thinks the latest rulemaking represents a turning of the tide in US copyright policy.

The mandate of P2PU - the peer-to-peer university - is "Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything". Going beyond open courseware, P2PU creates actual classes - online communities - that students can join to take the courses. Course designers can participate in an online course about designing courses!
Does P2PU offer formal credits? Not yet.

Ted Striphas writes about the Humane Reader project. Noting that e-books and the digitalization of reading "threatens to freeze large swaths of the world’s population out of one of the most important vehicles for literacy", Striphas points to the Humane Reader project, an open source-based ebook that is supposed to cost $20 bulk.

As the Canadian government prepares to unveil its new "anti-consumer" copyright bill, there is one relatively new problem that should be considered: e-books. Consumers want to be able to use their e-books over the years as technology changes. They want to use the e-books they buy today for their Kindle or their Sony E-Reader on the next generation of e-readers. Many ebooks are not only in today's format, but they are also locked by DRM to their current e-reader units. This is usually not advertised when the e-books are sold, so many consumers will be in for a surprise when they try to replace their e-readers in a few years.

The new copyright bill could potentially make it illegal to break those digital locks in the future when it's time to transfer those books onto future devices. The new bill is said to be based on bill C-61, which made the ability to format-shift your own content (froim an old format to a new format) illegal if the content had DRM on it, like most ebooks sold today do.

For many books, and especially academic ones, the price for the ebook is the same (sometimes hundreds of dollars) as it was for the print edition. Canadians shouldn't live in a world of expiring and disappearing books. Consumers should have the right to use books the way they're used to doing - i.e. to buy them and have them for life, and to use them for years to come on future generations of devices.