Digital Copyright Canada

I have sent in my comments to the CRTC on the development of a national code for wireless services. My submission is focused on the rights of cell phone owners.

Available as: PDF, Google Doc.

On March 30, 2012, Ms. May (MP for Saanich--Gulf Islands, Leader of the green Party) added a few motions to the Notice Paper, Report Stage of Bills.  I will offer my own quick comments on these motions in the hope that they are useful for the ongoing debate.

CIPPIC has filed a Statement of Defense on behalf of its client, Geolytica, in response to a lawsuit filed by the Canada Post Corporation in the Federal Court of Canada (File No. T-519-12) claiming that it owns copyright in its database of postal codes and that Geolytica has infringed that copyright by "crowd-sourcing" data for its own database of postal codes mapped to street addresses.

I have been watching this closely as it is linked to the Postal codes by federal ridings file (PCFRF) issue which we have an MP letter for. The electoral district boundary files are already publicly available, and it has been Canada Post's attempt to keep the postal code boundaries proprietary that has been at the root of this problem. Once the geodata for postal codes are properly publicly released, deriving the PCFRF from the two geodata files will be easy.

Crack the Coursepack is a public legal education project about Canadian copyright law, created in the context of Prof. Tina Piper’s Intellectual & Industrial Property class at the McGill Faculty of Law.

In the Ottawa GOSLING forum, in response to someone who suggested that opponents to nuclear power didn't care about the science, I wrote the following:

Issues with nuclear power are similar to GMO's. The problem isn't the science, but the inability of our governance structures to manage the complexities and the risks when mismanaged. After watching the C-11 committee hearings my belief in the ability of our governments to make sane decisions about technology is even lower than it was before, and I've always been an opponent of nuclear power and GMO's for governance reasons. The lack of basic science and technology literacy in government is extreme: I think they believe Harry Potter was a documentary.

GMO's = Genetically modified organism

In a land of myth, and a time of magic, a young technology journalist conducts an interview on digital locks. His name… Jesse Brown.

The person he is interviewing is Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran. Mr. Corcoran, admitting he doesn't understand technology, speaks of magical incantations that can be done over digitally encoded copyrighted works.

While Jesse and I both normally focus on discussing science and technology, I thought it might be interesting to explore what my views would be if I lived in the land of young Merlin or with the magic of Harry Potter.

Last week I had a letter to the Hill Times editor published which discussed the anti-competitive nature of the technological measures aspects of bill C-11.

I received the following question via twitter:

Read your letter in HillTimes. You really think Netflix should have no say how they want their content distributed?

My short twitter-length answer was:

There are infringing and non-infringing ways to do that http://c11.ca/brief - Businesses built on infringement not legit

by Russell McOrmond

I'm just a technical guy. I make my living as a systems administrator, software author and Internet consultant. After watching failures of the legislative process in the USA that lead to them passing laws that attacked the rights of technology owners and the interests of software authors, I decided I must get involved in Canada's political process. I participated in the consultation in the summer of 2001, and have been very active since. This includes sitting in on nearly all of the Bill C-32 and Bill C-11 committee meetings in-person, and being a witness in front of a Bill C-32 committee on March 8, 2011. I have been live tweeting and writing articles for each of these meetings. Now that committee work ended on March 13, the next steps will be a third reading in the House of Commons and then on to the Senate for whatever study they decide to do.

Read full article on OpenMedia.ca >>

The first amendment moved during clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-11 was an NDP amendment to introduce resale rights (See March 12 minutes for exact wording). This is a policy that the Liberal party has supported in the past. The chair ruled the amendment inadmissible as it was a new concept that is beyond the scope of Bill C-11.

Before proponents of the resale right take that as a failure, the process needs to be looked at more closely. This is also a good time to more publicly discuss the policy being proposed. Multiple bills on the same topic are not admissible within the same session of parliament. When the chair ruled the amendment inadmissible, he was effectively also ruling that tabling that policy as a private members bill would be admissible within this session.

Would an art resale right be good policy?

Clause-by-clause finished today, and the bill is now being reprinted (with the Government amendments that all passed -- no opposition passed) and sent back to the house for third reading and then on to the senate.

Will post more later, but wanted to quickly get video out. Also posted to OpenMedia.ca.