Digital Copyright Canada

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.

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.