Digital Copyright Canada

In many of the comments about Bill C-61 on BLOGS all across Canada you can hear people saying that all the parties are the same, and that we need a Canadian Pirate Party. The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a political party in Sweden that focus on one issue: reforming of so-called "Intellectual Property" laws such as patent, copyright, trademark and other related laws (also called PCT) to better integrate with a modern technological and participatory society.

There is, however, something exciting happening in one party that warrants a closer look for those who think fair copyright reform is important, and that is the NDP.

Read full article on p2pnet >>

See also: Copyright in Canada by Jon Newton which hilights a number of related articles.

I wasn't watching the US presidential primaries because I saw it as a race between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb. I have some political ideas that might otherwise slide me to supporting the Democrats, but then I look at the damage done during the Clinton/Gore years to the US domestic and foreign economic policy through the DMCA, Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and the two controversial 1996 WIPO treaties (largely US efforts). This isn't all that different than Canada where I have some political ideas that might otherwise convince me to vote Liberal, but then notice that some of the worst ideas on technology law have been promoted by Liberal MPs such as Sheila Copps, Sam Bulte (Lost her seat in the 2006 election), and now Dan McTeague and Hedy Fry.

I then watched a slideshow from Lawrence Lessig titled 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack. Lessig said that Obama's technology policies were strong, and that he was going to work to change congress to reduce the influence of special interest group money on the US congress. I quickly blogged about this myself back in February.

Read the rest of this entry on IT World Canada's BLOG »

The members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage have tabled a report where they make the following statement:

The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage recommends that the Government Bill entitled “An Act to amend the Copyright Act” for which notice was given on December 7th 2007, once introduced and read a first time, be referred to a Special Joint Committee made up of members or associate members of the Standing Committee of Canadian Heritage and of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology before second reading.

When reading an eWeek article by Roy Mark talking about political donations to US presidential candidates, I wondered what would be said in Canada. We don't have a separate executive branch, with our prime Minister simply being the leader of the party that receives the most seats, so an apples-to-apples comparison isn't possible.