Received from Chris Bradshaw:
;:Ms. Lawson,
;:It would be helpful for Canadians to debate the issues your question touch on, as they are new to most people.
;:I have been a student of information theory for over 30 years, including being on the executive of ACCESS, the Canadian Committee for Freedom of Information and Personal Privacy that helped bring in federal legislation in the early 1980s, working with Jed Baldwin (I was most active on personal privacy, having authoried a pamphlet for the Civil Liberties Association - National Capital Region in 1978, "Privacy and You." I was also the Consumer's Assoc. rep on the CSA standards committee on Telidon-like technologies, in the 1980s (succeeded by Andrew Clement).
Questions:
Music File-sharing: What is your position on the issue of file-sharing in Canada--should it be illegal?
;:I find the this practice is the result of the music industry trying to sell only packages of music, rather than individual tunes. The same is true of books (many people just want excerpts), and software (some people want only some of the thousands of features). Ironically, the technology is just coming available to deconstruct these traditional packages.
;:Thus the industry _created_ the practice. I see that there is a softening of their marketing to open up to a) youth's preference for just certain tunes from an album, and b) to dispense with all the physical packaging that adds so much to the price. It seems to be going back to the era of singles that I grew up in.
Technological Protection of Copyrighted Materials: What is your position on using legislation to prohibit circumvention of TPMs?
;:I am not familiar with the term. I have general concerns about copyrights, as they are overly rigidly protected, as the private investment in their development is "protected." I feel a) many breakthroughs are not possible with the secrecy that it engenders, b) that public contributions to what breakthroughs _do_ occur are not recognized, and c) that the costs that are charged to use the ensuing "advanced" solutions exclude many who need them from getting access to them once they are on the market. There is also the troubling examples in agriculture of the patenting of traditional seeds and practices.
Educational Use of Internet Materials: Do you support an amendment to the Copyright Act to allow for the use of freely available materials on the Internet by participants in an educational program?
;:Yes, with citation. What better system for people to become aware of the sources, and their relationship to other materials? After all, we don't pay students to study; why make them pay to access the material they need?
ISP Liability for copyright infringement: Should ISPs be protected from liability for copyright infringement when others merely transmit copyrighted materials over their facilities, or when others post copyrighted works on websites that the ISP merely hosts?
;:No. Let's distinquish between the medium and the message.
What is your position on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage's proposed "notice and takedown" scheme requiring ISPs to remove content on the sole basis of alleged copyright infringement?
;:Don't know enough.
Open Source Software: What is your position on increasing or mandating the use of open source software in government operations?
;:Our party is very much in support of it, proposing that governments shift to it.
Spam: How do you propose to approach the problem of spam?
;:Make it a law that all sources of e-mail be attached or the missives not be carried on the internet. The affront is that people can send message anonymously, a very disorienting practice to recipients, and is destroying the "information highway," just as a lack of licensing of motor vehicles would do to our streets (although it no longer seems to imnpose civility on our roads).
National ID cards: What is your position on National ID cards?
;:In principle, I am against them. But all it takes is for a private concern to offer "air miles" or some other reward program, to overcome public resistance. Information-rights literacy is very poor in our society.
;:Keep up the good work.
;:Chris Bradshaw
;:Green Candidate in Leeds Grenville