Digital Copyright Canada

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).

On the 21st September, I emailed the minister about C-11. I asked specifically why the government was making it illegal to bypass the region encoding to watch the DVDs I purchased in Europe here in Canada. Here's the response I received today.

The NDP announced their shadow cabinet last week. Of particular interest on the copyright front are:
Ethics, Access to Information, Privacy & Copyright and Digital Issues - Charlie Angus
Industry - Peter Julian
Trade - Robert Chisholm
Heritage - Tyrone Benskin
Science and Technology - Hélène Leblanc

Full list here.

I was thinking about the recent DMCA rulemaking in the US, which led me to this "simple guide to copyright".

You can legally do pretty much anything you like with your own property,

unless it's a "fixation" of a copyrighted work and what you want do is a right granted to the rightsholder,

unless it's covered by one of the "fair dealing" exceptions.

That's not too bad. Of course, in the US, or in Canada if C-32 passes as-is, you need to add a couple more lines:

Interesting statistics from Copyright and Technology Blog :

[...] academic research into DRM and other rights technologies in the United States has diminished to virtually nil.

(For example, a search of IEEE shows that of all digital rights-related research papers published from 2008 to the present, 40% were from China, 27% were from the rest of Asia, 20% were from Europe, and less than 4% were from the United States. Spain by itself had more activity than the US.)

I was thinking about this last night after reading another "but we have to have the C-32 approach to TPMs for the creators to get paid" article, and think I found a way to explain my thinking.

Let's divide Canadians into 4 groups based on their ability to bypass TPMs and their respect for copyright law :

Vancouver Fair Copyright has put together a guide (PDF) to help people put together submissions for the copyright consultation.

You know how the music and movie industries are always saying that they need legal protection for DRM to "allow them" to try out different business models, and how Canada's copyright laws need to be changed to grant them more rights so that they can offer Canadians different products ? Well, now we know what they mean, with the news that Google is launching a free, ad-supported music service. So which country is it that has tough enough copyright laws to actually support this ? China, of course !

Here's a great blog entry by Clay Shirky about the future of journalism. He points out that when you're living through a revolution, the people pointing out what's happening are regarded as radicals, while the people who ignore it are thought of as pragmatists, when it's really the other way round. He also points out that during a revolution, nobody can see what the world be like afterwards - you just need to try lots of things and see what works.

Techdirt has an article about the effect of copyright on classical music. Classical music tends to straddle the time when copyright was invented, so there should be some good evidence for the value of copyright in achieving its aims of increasing the incentive to create cultural works. The latest research from Harvard, though, apparently shows the opposite.