Digital Copyright Canada

I was interviewed by Jesse Brown for TVO Search Engine on Friday, and the MP3 of that interview is now available.

Note: Apologies for the sound quality at my end. I was at my workplace and we ended up using the microphone built into my tablet, which offered better sound than the external mic I use with my phone. Seems I need to buy a better microphone if I plan use VOIP on this tablet in the future.

The seventh meeting of the C-11 special legislative committee was held on March 5, 2012.

Most of the discussion seemed very familiar, with the interactions from MPs matching what I wrote on the weekend as the theme that has emerged from committee. Near the end of the day we heard Mr. Lake going into details of what the bill actually says, suggesting (quite correctly in my mind) that many of the fears that some of the witnesses have about the copyright bill are simply not reflected in the bill.

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.