Digital Copyright Canada

I don't always agree with Eric S. Raymond, but believe his open letter to Chris Dodd is right on the mark.

In my words: The technology community has drawn lines in the sand. Your right to protect your copyright ends at our computers and our Internet. We will help if you want to create an honest way to make a living that doesn't cross those lines, but if you want to attack what we consider to be fundamental rights we will defend ourselves and those rights from people we consider to be "liars and thieves".

I have noticed a theme emerging at the C-11 committee.  Copyright law impacts other areas of policy, including cultural policy and with the type of Paracopyright policy in C-11 we see impacts on property, contract, eComerce and other areas of (primarily provincial) law.

While the governing Conservatives have the copyright policy right, they have the non-copyright policy wrong.  The official opposition NDP have the non-copyright policy right, but have the copyright policy wrong.   The lonely Liberal is just doing what he can to get a question or comment in from time to time.

While not related to Copyright, I wanted to mention bill C-304 which I have been following.

Among other things, it repeals section 13 of of the Canadian Human Rights Act, something I am strongly in favor of.

The sixth meeting of the C-11 special legislative committee was held on March 1, 2012.

First group of witnesses was from CHUM radio, bought by Bell to now be Bell Media Radio. They had two simple messages. Between themselves and parent company they are both content creator/copyright holders and ISPs, and they believe the government got the right balance with notice-and-notice.They want this to move forward as, while the big telecommunications companies already follow regime, not everyone does (smaller ISPs, wireless, etc).

The fifth meeting of the C-11 special legislative committee was held on February 29, 2012.

The first witness of the first session gave familiar arguments. While it was the Canadian Independent Music Association, they gave a mini-me performance of what the major labels already presented: The sky was falling, and the blame was entirely from citizens not paying for music. Oh, but lets not target actual infringers, they want to go after the alleged "enablers" of that infringement. Oh, and TPMs were a must and were allegedly necessary for their business.

The fourth meeting of the C-11 special legislative committee was held on February 28, 2012.

Witnesses: Canadian Federation of Musicians: Bill Skolnik, Chief Executive Officer; Warren J. Sheffer, Legal Counsel. Pineridge Broadcasting: Don Conway, President. Re:Sound Music Licensing Company: Ian MacKay, President; Matthew Fortier, Director, Communications. Association nationale des éditeurs de livres: Aline Côté, President, Les Éditions Berger; Jean Bouchard, Vice-President and General Manager, Groupe Modulo. Canadian School Boards Association: Cynthia Andrew, Policy Analyst, Ontario Public School Boards Association. Association of Canadian Community Colleges: Michèle Clarke, Director, Government Relations and Policy Research, Public Affairs; Claude Brulé, Dean, Algonquin College.

The third meeting of the C-11 special legislative committee was held on February 27, 2012, and followed what will be the normal process for witnesses where the 3 hours is divided into two parts.

The first session had three people marked as individuals, and the second session had someone from the Alliance for Equality of Blind people, and two people representing photographers.

While I hope to post commentary later, I did live-tweet (via @russellmcormond)the two "Internet fora" I attended today.

In the morning I was at CIRA's Canadian Internet Forum. One of the panel speakers was Michael Geist who spoke about how the other "Internet forum" was happening in parliament with all the Internet regulation bills.

I then left CIRA's forum to head to center block of parliament to observe the Bill C-11 committe.

The minutes from the in-camera meeting held on February 16, 2012, and it contains a list of organizations and individuals that will appear before the Bill C-11 committee. (Update: Notice of meeting 3)

As I look over the list I see many more of the familiar apologists for laws that will legalize and legally protect infringements of IT property rights such as James Gannon from law firm McCarthy Tetrault. What I hope to see are people who will defend against this lack of respect for property rights, with the obvious name that stuck out being law professor Jeremy F. deBeer.

Our community hosts a few petitions to the federal parliament. Our first was the Petition for Users' Rights which we launched in 2004 during a Liberal government, and the second was the Petition to protect Information Technology property rights which was launched in 2006 soon after the Conservative government formed. At the time I thought protecting property rights was a non-brainer for a Conservative government, but it turns out that I was wrong. If we don't focus on our rights and interests as technology owners, this Conservative government will blindly trample our rights without even acknowledging us as legitimate stakeholders.