Digital Copyright Canada

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.

Just received this response from the Ministry. Any typos are likely my own!

Dear Chris Brand:

On behalf of the Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister for Industry, thank you for your e-mail of March 13, 2013, regarding Bill C-56, the Combating Counterfeit Products Act (the Bill).

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a scientific institute of the European Commission, released a report with a familiar message: illegal music downloads aren't a substitute for legal music downloads. While I believe this type of research is critical to debunk the outrageous claims about the economic harm abused to justify backward policy choices, I don't think economic impact alone is the entire story.

If someone broke into our home and did not take anything, only rummaged through our belongings (possibly taking pictures, etc), we would still feel violated. Integral to home ownership is the right to decide who can enter our homes, and our privacy and property rights are violated even if nothing was taken or damaged, and there was no economic impact.