Digital Copyright Canada

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.

This opinion piece is well worth reading. It's actually tough to pick a few paragraphs to give you the flavour of it.

Techdirt has a useful article about how useful software patents actually are.

He points out that :
- companies will usually only patent stuff that would get disclosed anyway, relying on trade secret protection for the rest;
- Microsoft tells their employees to "never search, view, or speculate about patents", partly due to the worries over "willful infringement" and partly because you wouldn't learn anything from them anyway.

The Globe and Mail has an article by Ivor Tossell in which he tells us what he's afraid of online.

One section is "The copyright meltdown". It's a little vague - he's certainly afraid of C-61-like-legislation, but I'm not too clear on what he'd prefer to see. What I found interesting, though, is that he doesn't connect it to his first section "The approaching muzzle" on censorship.

There are lots of reports today about comments about DRM made by RIAA executives.

Hughes also said that DRM must change so that the public sees it less as a sort of policeman that locks music a way. He would prefer a mode where consumers don't notice DRM at all. "People just want music when they want it," he said. "It's about access. If they get that then they don't care about DRM."

I was reading a Techdirt article about the US Attorney General equating counterfeiting with piracy, and starting thinking about the two.
What is the difference between a "counterfeit" tube of toothpaste and a "pirated" CD ?

There seems to be more and more recognition of the idea that more and more patents aren't necessarily a good thing. This blog post points to a paper (PDF) that tries to quantify the costs of bad patents.