Digital Copyright Canada

Some copyright holders and their lobbiests claim the reason people infringe Copyright is because they don't want to pay, and that copyright infringement is the largest single problem reducing their revenue potential. Evidence I've seen in my decades involved in the copyright revision process suggested neither are true, and that barriers put up by the copyright holders are the largest incentive to infringe and the largest barrier to revenue potential.

The BBC is an example of a broadcaster I would like to pay money and subscribe to (not only for Doctor Who), but that continues to put up barriers to me doing so.

As Shomi received a lot of advertising in recent months I have been asked my opinion on it. I'm known as someone who has strong opinions on digital content distribution, and as someone who is a subscriber to Netflix and not to any traditional BDU (Broadcast Distribution Undertaking, the term the CRTC uses to refer to Satellite, Cable, and related companies).

My shortest answer is to say these these services aren't new, nor are they in the same market as Netflix. These services are an add-on service for existing BDU customers (Must be Television customer for Bell, but can be existing TV or Internet customer for Rogers and Shaw), and not a service that is untied to the BDU.

In a press release, the Harper Government Announces the Coming into Force of the Notice and Notice Regime, using the same language they used to promote the controversial bill.

While I agree that the copyright portions of that bill could be claimed to be "balanced", I will still state the anti-technology ownership "TPM" sections of the bill were unbalanced.

Given the variety of house and senate bills proposing information disclosures without court oversight being pushed by the Harper Government, the notice&notice regime in the Copyright Act will soon be moot. It is highly unlikely that an aggressive copyright holder will use N&N when they will be able to get subscriber information without a court order and communicate threats directly to ISP customers.

I made a submission to the competition bureau as part of their request for input. This was based on a submission I had made in 2003, updated to reflect new issues in the last decade including the passage of the C-11 Copyright bill.

C-11's "technological measures" components are presumed to protect encrypted media, which is better understood in a competition rather than a copyright sense. While there is no credible evidence that these measures help reduce copyright infringement, there is considerable evidence that they are being abused to manipulate separate markets as well as harm competitors in the same market.

While we knew this was coming, Canada has officially ratified the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.

This doesn't mean Canadian law can't be fixed when it comes to "technological measures" given these treaties don't require access controls or protection of circumventions of measures not related to copyright infringement. This means nearly all of the direct or indirect infringements of IT property rights, and all the anti-competitive behaviour (tied selling, copyright holders manipulating hardware/software markets, hardware/software companies manipulating content industries, etc), can be clarified as not legalized or legally protected under copyright" law.

I didn't have time to create a more formal blog entry with all the references I like to have, but I did post some year-end thoughts to the general mailing list. This may encourage others to join the list and comment as well.

This is a question that Michael Geist asks in his blog, and I have problems with the focus of this article. The suggestion is that the physical location of where the CPU, RAM and hard disks data is stored on should be our primary concern.

The primary concern should be who controls the software authors who write the software that accesses and manipulates our data. While there are a narrow set of circumstances where geography of the hardware matters, the reality is that we need to be able to trust the vendors who write the software running on computers physically located close to us as much as we do cloud software services.

(The following is a re-posting of thoughts I posted to the GOSLING mailing list in response to questions about why the government created the Open Government Licence – Canada rather than adopt the generic Creative Commons or Open Knowledge Foundation licenses)

This OGLC license has an advantage to the government in that the license itself answers many of the most common misconceptions (IE: privacy, third party rightsholders, non-copyright rights) when dealing with government data that doesn't seem to come into play with other knowledge sharing.

The PM has announced Canada's signing on to a G8 Open Data Charter. That charter includes the following under Part Two - Collective Actions:

Action 2: Release of high value data

• We recognise the following as areas of high value, both for improving our democracies and encouraging innovative re-use of data.
  ...
  Geospatial | Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
  

Does this mean we will finally have the data released to build and freely distribute a replacement for the expensive PCFRF product?

Please help by voting up the release of the postal code database.

The CRTC has issued a new wireless code. Much of the talk is about contracts, which weren't what concerned me, but there are also details about non-owner device locks.

Devices must be able to be unlocked, but a fee is still allowed. I know that Fido previously offered unlocking at a $50, which meant that when we travelled to Europe before I got my new Nexus 4 that we purchased an additional $40 unlocked flip-phone rather than unlocking a phone I already owned.