Digital Copyright Canada

Dan Gillmor offers great words for those of us mourning Aaron Swartz.

January 1'st each year we morbidly celebrate the death of authors and other creative persons. Flaws in the law mean the expiry of the copyright monopoly, and works finally entering the public domain to the enrichment of all humanity, is most often calculated from the year of a creative person's death.

Wallace J.McLean, Meera Nair and Michael Geist all blogged about the celebration.

There has been considerable discussion (debate, flamewars) about gun control in the wake of the tragic shooting in Newton, Conn. -- so much that the NRA hid its Facebook page to avoid hosting flame wars.

It is hard for me not to be reminded of the debates about computer control while listening to all the debates on gun control.  (See: Protecting the property, privacy and other rights of owners: Bill C-19 and Bill C-11 , The long computer registry and IT control).

I have been contributing to a thread on Google+ about a copyright/patent reform proposal by Karl Fogel.

While the specific proposal is interesting, I am most happy about the overall themes.

• Recognition that we are talking about statutory monopolies, and all monopolies have a social and economic cost which must be considered.
  
• Recognition that there is a need for registration and renewal for this monopoly, after a possible formality-free grace period.
  
• Recognition that this monopoly should come at an economic price (registration/renewal fees, taxation, etc) to the monopoly rightsholder.
  

Whatever specific reforms are suggested, debated and discussed, these offer a critically needed starting point.

While unfortunate, I was not surprised to hear that representatives of the Writers Union of Canada (TWUC) crashed a private meeting of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges (ACCC) on November 12'th. Like a "Yes Men" type of event these uninvited guests forced themselves in front of the assembled members to speak and pamphlet. They were rude enough that they had to be asked to leave the premises. TWUC protesters video taped their intrusion and sent out a press release.

I was worried this type of thing would happen when I heard that John Degen had become the executive director at TWUC. I first met Mr Degen in 2006, and my concern then was that a certain subset of authors he was part of were lobbying to remove choices from author. Suggesting that there is only one true business model to pay authors, and that authors should not be allowed to explore potentially more lucrative alternatives, appears to remain at the heart of the TWUC protest.

Many parts of the C-11 came into force on Wednesday as part of a notice in the Canada Gazette.

Also published on the same day: MicroSD Cards Exclusion Regulations (Copyright Act), which temporarily excludes MicroSD cards from the private copying levy. The government went out of their way to protect the levy (what they sometimes call a "tax") in Bill C-11 itself.

Sections relating to the two WIPO treaties will be delayed until it is confirmed that Canadian law conforms to the requirements of those treaties.

There is also a delay relating to the notice-and-notice regime for ISP liability.

Elections Canada has announced 3 by-elections.

In a previous blog article I compared software vendors and political parties. This is a theme I've been discussing for years. When speaking to politicians I suggest they know more about software than they think, and that the most important dynamics they need to understand about software are similar to political science.

Lawrence Lessig wrote in Code about how computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley in the USA) may regulate our lives similar to how legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does. While there are rare examples of individuals authoring their own code that governs their own lives, in the majority case the code is authored by one group of people and governs many people who in some way choose to be governed by that group.

How much choice people have in what team authors the code they are governed by is considered critical in legal code, with many in the west considering it worth going to war to protect their right to choose in the form of democracy. In most countries we choose individuals part of a team, with those teams called political parties.

A blog article by Kady O'Malley about a new feature on the parliamentary website suggests that rather than moving towards Internet standards that the parliamentary IT folks are moving to being more software vendor dependant.

In this case it was a new "View this Video" feature only being available under Microsoft's Internet Explorer. There is an ugly hack called IETab which allows Internet Explorer to run within Firefox or Chrome, but that still requires the use of a specific brand of browser that only runs on a single historically popular operating system.

The popularity of an operating system or device at any moment in time should not be considered relevant to new features on the parliamentary website. At one time the Liberals held a majority, and by the logic of suggesting that having a majority once means that things should be mandated forever we should be mandating that only Liberal party members be able to access new features on the parliamentary website.

I've received a few emails about a document (PDF) describing the track records of Collective rights organizations (CROs), including from InfoJustice and one of the founders of Unglue.it (Another awesome alternative to CROs).

My own concerns about how CROs often push for exceptions to copyright in the form of compulsory licensing was included (See page 18, 19), with a reference to "Independent authors just wanting a little respect... from fellow creators and collective societies".