Digital Copyright Canada

My first draft of the op-ed for Georgia Straight was far too long, and included not only discussion of digital locks but also commentary about government imposing royalty-based business models. It also used Georgia Straight articles by Bill Henderson and Marian Hebb as illustrations. I'm including here that last part that needed to be cut out of the op-ed.

A CBC News article by Emily Chung writes about a motion before Vancouver city council discussing open standards, open data and open source.

A Globe and Mail article by Ivor Tossell feature's Toronto's Mark Surman and the Centre for Social Innovation.

For those who are running under the banner of "Fair Copyright for Canada", they should take a look at US bill HR6845: “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act”.

According to an email I just received from the Public Library of Science:

On September 11, 2008, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) introduced a bill that would effectively reverse the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place.

In yet another blow to vendor lock-in and proprietary software standards, the Associated Press is reporting that the Dutch Government on Wednesday adopted laws requiring all national agencies to use the Open Document Format by April 2008. Even state and local agencies are required to comply by 2009; though there is flexibility in the new policy - agencies can chose to use proprietary standards, such as MS Office, but they must justify use. The new laws also mandate the use of FOSS in all agencies in a similar manner, for cost savings and accessibility reasons.

GOSLING, eat your heart out!

An article by Greg Toppo in USA TODAY talks about Open Access materials being built for K-2 students.

Canadians should be aware that the largest component of the fees collected by Access Copyright are destined to educational publishers, so replacing these old-economy publishers with Open Access would be extremely lucrative low-hanging-fruit. This would not only save provincial educational budgets millions of dollars, it would also reduce the financial and political power of one of the forces towards backward-facing copyright maximization in Canada.

The OECD has launched a public consultation for the Ministerial Meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy.

There's a preparatory meeting in Ottawa 3rd October, with various options for online participation, and there's an online questionnaire asking for comments in 4 areas :
* Using the Internet to improve future economic performance and social welfare
* Benefiting from convergence
* Fuelling [sic] creativity
* Building confidence

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/

A very interesting and creative blog on open access. Their description pretty much sums up my own viewpoint and hopes for open access thereby allowing me to introduce myself to Digital Copyright!

Michael Geist blogged today about the increase in our cultural trade deficit, largely with the United States (See WorldMapper visual from 2002).

The Statistics Canada study he linked to indicates the following breakdown of what we were importing:

Canadians imported mainly books and newspapers from the United States. For every $10 of culture goods Canadians imported from the United States, $7.61 were spent on writing and published works, $0.85 on film and video, and $0.58 on advertising. The remainder was spread among sound recordings, photography and original art.

On the website of the Standards Council for Canada earlier this month, the agency asks for input relating to a proposal to adopt Open Office XML as the international standard.

read the press release

The deadline for comments is in July. Go to the link to give your input.