When I met James Rajotte on October 18, I dropped off signatures to our two petitions. I have been waiting to hear them tabled, but noticed today that they were instead just filed with the Clerk of Petitions on December 10, 2007.

Pursuant to Standing Order 36, petitions certified correct by the Clerk of Petitions were filed as follows:

- by Mr. Rajotte (Edmonton—Leduc), two concerning the Copyright Act (Nos. 392-0187 and 392-0188).

I will be holding onto other signatures I have received given we are very likely heading into a spring election. I want to have some ready to be tabled early in the next session.

The new Copyright bill expected to be tabled for first reading in December is getting a lot of attention. Michael Geist posted an update to his 30 Days of DRM: 30 Things You Can Do which included reference to the petitions on this site. This article was referenced by many other sites, including SlashDot.

This may be the first time some people visit this site.

Petitions

We have a number of petitions we are sending to the Canadian parliament. Please print and sign all of them. They are on paper rather than electronic so that they can be tabled in Parliament. It is best if you try to get the signed petitions to us so we can coordinate getting them to members of parliament, as signatures have been lost by members of parliament.

These petitions are generic in their wording, and not specific to any bill being tabled.

Art Hanger, the Member of Canadian parliament for Calgary Northeast, today tabled a batch of 87 signatures for the Petition for Users' Rights. The signatures were colleced in Calgary by Brett Wuth at a talk by Richard Stallman in Calgary on May 18th, 2005 : The Danger of Software Patents.

An article by Graeme Wearden of UK ZDNet includes:

The UK government has rejected a call for digital rights management to be banned in the UK, but has acknowledged that the technology could undermine consumer rights.

A total of 1,414 people signed an online petition calling for digital rights management (DRM) — which places restrictions on how people can use media such as software or music — to be outlawed.

The government response contained marketing material from the pro-DRM camp, suggesting they are still relying on broshures rather than science for their analysis.

While our Canadian DRM-specific petition to protect ICT property rights have not received as many signatures, our petition for Users' Rights received more with 2,540 physical signatures so far. This larger petition included a call for the Canadian government "to recognise the right of citizens to personally control their own communication devices", which along with anti-interoperability technology is the core of DRM.

Each day in mid-morning I check my mail and am very excited when there are signatures to one of our petitions. Having passed 2500 signatures for our Users' Rights petition and 100 signatures for our IT property rights petition, I wanted to write about why petitions are important.

An Industry Committee report on the Manufacturing sector has a recommendation that has nothing at all to do with Manufacturing: the ratification of the 2 1996 WIPO treaties relating to copyright. While a subset of patents relate to manufacturing, I don't see how copyright relates to manufacturing at all.

Manufacturing: Moving Forward — Rising to the Challenge

RECOMMENDATION 11 :

That the Government of Canada immediately bring forth legislation to amend the Copyright Act; ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT); amend related acts; and ensure appropriate enforcement resources are allocated to combat the scourge and considerable economic and competitive damage to Canada's manufacturing and services sectors, and to Canada's international reputation by the proliferation of counterfeiting and piracy of intellectual property.

Monday Feb 5 at 11:00 EST on CKUT radio (90.3FM in Montreal, streaming on the Internet, and archives within an hour), Lila Roussel and Yannick Delbecque will be interviewing me on L'heure est au libre. We will be talking about Microsoft Vista (DRM vs computer security), Network Neutrality, and an update on copyright revision in Canada.

The Webmaster for the Ubuntu.ca website has posted an endorsement of our petitions.

Taking shameless advantage of my quasi-editorial position here at ubuntu.ca, I like both petitions, will sign them myself, and would love to see my Ubuntu LoCo join CLUE in endorsing them. An official decision will probably have to wait until our January team meeting, though. — Brian

Are you part of a group that could endorse the petitions? This is not the organization signing the petition (as parliament only accepts signatures from persons and not groups), but would be your organization saying that it read, understood and recommended that its membership signed.

Today I dropped off 87 signatures at the office of Art Hanger, MP for Calgary Northeast. Mr Hanger seems to be very engaged with constituents signing petitions, and has a page on his website dedicated to them. These signatures were collected at a Calgary UNIX Users Group event on May 18th, 2005.

Parliament may be going on recess as early as this Wednesday, adjourning until January 29. While the Heritage Minister claimed a copyright bill would be tabled in the fall, it is clear that this can't happen. Hopefully parliamentarians are reading Michael Geist's column which suggests that a smaller package of less controversial copyright amendments would be far more useful than an omnibus bill like Bill C-60 which pretty much everyone had one problem or another with.