Digital Copyright Canada

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) tipped their hand a bit in this years submission to the “Special 301" report process. While they again attacked Canada for having strong copyright law that is different than the USA, the most telling was their opposition to policies encouraging legally free of charge Open Source in their submissions for Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Encouraging legally free software is by far the best policy instrument to reduce software copyright infringement for the less financially rich countries and individuals of the world. For the vast majority of the worlds population the only viable options are to infringe royalty-based software or switch to royalty-free alternatives. The fact the IIPA is encouraging countries to have policies which increase infringement rather than have people switch to competing software is telling about their actual goals.

This is consistent with what past Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes previously stated, "If they're going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else".

An interview by Shane O'Neill of Keith Curtis discusses Keith's book book After the Software Wars: proprietary software is holding us back as a society.

As someone who agrees that the legacy sole-proprietor knowledge creation/distribution model is holding us back, and how Microsoft's (lack of a) future is described in the Innovators Dilemma, I suspect I'll find this a great read.

An article by Nestor E. Arellano for ITWorldCanada.com (NA) discusses the government RFI on "No Charge Licensed Software". The article included some material from a conversation that Nestor and I had. It makes mention of my own submission which I have made publicly available: OpenDocument version, PDF version.

Other submissions made publicly available: Evan Leibowitz of Xunil corporation, Mike Gifford of OpenConcept.

If you know of other published submissions, please let us know (add comment, etc)

CBC news reporter Emily Chung interviewed a number of people in the community on the Canadian Government RFI on what they called "No Charge Licensed Software (NCLS)".

Most techies have seen both of the advertisements featuring Jerry and Bill, and have read all the commentary about how most people hated them. While I disliked them, I disliked them because I dislike their successful message, not because I thought the advertisements were a failure.

If you look at any of the Securities and Exchange filings from Microsoft over recent years (5 or so) you will notice that Microsoft lists Linux and Open Source as their greatest competitive threat. One of the things that Free/Libre and Open Source Software offers is this warm-and-fuzzy community feeling about it, that by using this software and supporting it that you are somehow being more of a humanitarian -- almost a form of environmental and social consciousness to your software decisions.

Already being seen by many as the "evil empire", Microsoft can't fight that -- or can they?

Read full article on IT World Canada's blog »

Michael Geist has posted an article "The Battle Over Internet Filtering" where he discusses a seminar in Brussels on the "telecoms package" currently before the European Parliament. He listed out some of the views of the stakeholders on issues like DRM, "three strikes and you're out" policies ("graduated response") , "technical mandates", ISP filtering/blocking of infringing content, and stronger cross-border enforcement initiatives (ACTA).

Read the rest of this entry »

While my analysis has focused on the failure of the IDC/BSA studies to differentiate infringement from competition, an article by Mike Masnick in TechDirt takes on some of the other major flaws.

An article by Jordan Golson for The Industry Standard talks about the release of the BSA 2007 State Piracy Study, which claimed that one in five pieces of software in use in the United States was unlicensed.

Before anyone worries too much, read Lies, Damned lies, and IIPA/BSA/etc statistics. They use these same bogus statistics in their promotion of Bill C-61 and other backward-facing legislative reforms.

David Fewer, staff counsel at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), was quoted in an article by Vawn Himmelsbach discussing software copyright infringement, counterfeiting, and possible public policy responses.

On an individual level, most software companies don't mind a little bit of piracy, he said.

Microsoft would much rather have university students using a pirated version of Windows as opposed to Linux or – God forbid – Apple.

One of the key tools used by lobby groups like the IIPA is statistics to try to "prove" that there is massive harm to them, and which must be remedied in the way they propose. An analysis of their statistics often indicates that their real target is competitors, not copyright infringers.

These studies need to be debunked as they have a large influence on governments who have outsourced this key policy tool to special interest groups. William Patry documents on his BLOG (Via Google Cache) how, lacking any investigative resources of its own, USTR uses figures given to it by IIPA. If you read transcripts from Canadian parliamentary committees studying "counterfeiting and piracy" or Copyright and patents, you will see that Canadian politicians are no better. It is frustrating to know how many amazing economists are working for Industry Canada and other departments, and yet Industry Committee never bothered to consult them when they are studying critical economic policy.

Those debunking these studies are not apologists for copyright infringement. I document how this infringement harms companies like my own more than the members BSA/ESA/etc. I am very interested to stop software copyright infringement, but believe that the policies promoted by the BSA/ESA/etc have an anti-competitive effect and do not reduce software copyright infringement.

Read the rest of this entry on IT World Canada's BLOG..