CITIZENS: was Re: [Cdn-DMCA] Fwd: [Upd-discuss] Position paper on keeping limits to copyright? [andyo@oreilly.com]

From: Liss Jeffrey <ljeffrey _-at-_ ecommons.net>
To: No DMCA in Canada <canada-dmca-opponents (at) flora.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 11:25:48 -0500

Fabulous response to Fergal, Russell, and happy new year to list.
For anyone on list located in Toronto US lawyer and author of Code, 
Lawrence Lessig is giving a free public talk at U of T Law School Thursday, 
January 17, 5 PM on "Free Culture." He is talking about IP and copyright. 
Liss J

=====================
Just slightly off topic I hope:

In one of the graduate seminars that I teach at McLuhan Program, U of 
Toronto, New media and policy, I run into the same sort of fatalism, 
passivity and cynicism.  No disrespect, but this seems to be especially 
prevalent among the young who lack creative opportunities outside their own 
immediate environment  (like a school newspaper, a web site, a volunteer 
placement).
By analysing the process of government, in the context of corporate and 
civil society actors, and looking at campaigns that have succeeded as well 
as those that have failed - like the anti-land mines campaign, stopping the 
MAI (Multilateral agreement on investments), stopping the Spadina express 
way (for Toronto people), positively changing attitudes towards drinking 
and driving and heedless pollution and much more - we seek to get to the 
roots of political participation in a non-cynical and also non-naive way.
By leaving automatic ideology out of things (left or right), and finding 
solid and often less dramatic examples, there are lots of ways to prove 
that there is more than a snowball's chance in hell when (as I prefer) 
citizens dare to care.
But it takes work, analysis, and the persuasion of others to effect change.
Sounds too liberal for some? Well, that's what democracy feels like.
I should add that in 2002, the New media Policy grad course convenes itself 
as a think tank and creates media (forums, lists etc.) around diverse 
issues. Copyright and IP are a major part of the discussion.

Our group at the byDesign eLab went from academic work on such matters to 
creation of the not for profit national electronic commons/agora 
electronique project (re-launching end of April) to make sure that we could 
collectively secure the public sphere online, and that the many active 
citizen and community groups out there can be listed and located in one 
spot (this list will be featured of course, with Russell's permission). We 
have high school students, newcomers to Canada, programmers, academics, 
community activists, and more involved in our work. It is only a start, and 
there are tons of ways to start.

Again, thanks to the original writer and to Russell and pardon for this 
brief detour from copyright/i.p. to some fundamentals.
Liss Jeffrey
director general
eCommons  check us out at ecommons.net
=====================

At 10:39 PM 1/15/02 -0500, you wrote:

>On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Fergal Warde wrote:
>
> > Hi everyone, I'm new to this list.. I'm a high school student who sees a
> > very dim future in terms of civil liberties especially online.. Anyway..
>
>   I went into a high-school class this last semester to talk about these
>very issues.  The class saw the movie "Anti-Trust" and then I came in as
>an example of an "Open Source" (Really, Free Software) consultant.  I
>spoke mostly about the politics surrounding computing.
>
>   Your pessimism was shared by the students in that class. I have been
>told by my high-school teaching wife (Biology teacher) is in fact a very
>common thing in people of high-school age.
>
>   I will actually be going to a teachers Professional Development day in
>February to talk to some of the local science/tech teachers about these
>issues.
>
>
>   We can't continue to say things like "which has a snowball's chance in
>hell of happening", we must simply make it happen.  There is no utility in
>giving up, and the only way to effect positive change is to believe you
>can and march forward.  Being young you haven't yet experienced any of the
>successes of a campaign you were involved in, but you can look at what
>others have witnessed.
>
>
>   When I was in early University I first discovered gnu.misc.discuss, and
>was around to witness the debate with then-unknown Linus Torvalds about
>what type of license he should use for his new minix-clone.
>
>   I watched things grow from that nothingness to the huge visibility of
>Linux, BSD and the GNU system today.
>
>
>   The balance of Copyright/Patents/etc has been an ongoing debate for
>quite some time. The fact that the debate is at the level of SSSCA (IE:
>user programmable computers would be illegal, programmers would need to be
>bonded, computer science classes closed) indicates to me that we are
>partly winning the battle.  They wouldn't be asking to try to destroy the
>foundations of free market economics in a post-Industrial economy unless
>they recognized that this change was a considerable threat to their
>corporate-feudalistic interests.
>
>   Our job should never be seen as trying to convince the Disney or the
>Microsoft's of the world of anything - they are simply the outdated feudal
>lords of the past.  Our job is to point out to the general public the
>advances we as a society can make by moving forward away from such
>nonsense.
>
>---
>  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
>  See http://weblog.flora.org/ for announcements, activities, and opinions
>  "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,
>   we don't believe in it at all." -- Noam Chomsky
>
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