Digital Copyright Canada

Our friend Russell McOrmond has previously outlined the electoral success of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament.

A fundamental difference between the electoral system of the European Parliament and Canada's Parliament is the electoral system for the lower house.

The Swedish Pirate Party (Wikipedia) has won one seat (possibly two) in the 2009 European parliamentary elections.

I'm going to link two seemingly unrelated things. First, check out the last episode of CBC's Search Engine where Jesse Brown and Michael Geist discuss how the Obama administration has embarrassed itself by elevating Canada to their priority watchlist for Copyright. By any objective fact-based analysis Canada shouldn't be on the list at all, and yet this unsubstantiated lobbiest document from the Obama administration unfairly puts Canada in the company of countries that are a real problem to the economic interests of the US "Intellectual Property" lobby. Not Change we can believe in, but Change for the worse?

Then check out an interview between Jesse and Mike Miner about TVO's Search Engine.

An interesting set of threads on SlashDot about the Democratic Convention website using Microsoft's Silverlight platform to distribute multimedia -- excluding anyone not running Windows or MacOS. This is the same party who through policy-laundering their NII policy through WIPO gave the USA their DMCA and was the blueprint for Bill C-61.

It may be interesting for Canadians to speculate what outcome of the 2008 US election will be worse for harming the rights of technology owners. Other thoughts?

See also: ZDNet: Joe Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record by Declan McCullagh

A Wired BLOG article by Sarah Lai Stirland discusses Obama's presumed win of the Democratic nomination for president.

I've reference Obama in a few past articles that may be worth looking at. It is interesting how many of us got caught up in his campaign, including myself.

• Key question about the shape of the knowledge economy.
  
• How I would be voting for President if I were a citizen of the USA?
  
• Politicians will be politicians: Obama’s technology policy not as good as advertised?
  

I wasn't watching the US presidential primaries because I saw it as a race between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb. I have some political ideas that might otherwise slide me to supporting the Democrats, but then I look at the damage done during the Clinton/Gore years to the US domestic and foreign economic policy through the DMCA, Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and the two controversial 1996 WIPO treaties (largely US efforts). This isn't all that different than Canada where I have some political ideas that might otherwise convince me to vote Liberal, but then notice that some of the worst ideas on technology law have been promoted by Liberal MPs such as Sheila Copps, Sam Bulte (Lost her seat in the 2006 election), and now Dan McTeague and Hedy Fry.

I then watched a slideshow from Lawrence Lessig titled 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack. Lessig said that Obama's technology policies were strong, and that he was going to work to change congress to reduce the influence of special interest group money on the US congress. I quickly blogged about this myself back in February.

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

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 ITBusiness.ca article by Paolo Del Nibletto starts with, "Before I start explaining what the International Intellectual Property Alliance is doing, I wish to say what a load of crap this all is." The editors at ITBusiness rightly suggest that, "Harper has more important things to do than pander to these interests".

There is a good article by Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache of CNET News.com that summarizes some of the technology law issues. I have my reservations about the Democrats, considering they brought in the controversial policy behind the DMCA (If technology can be abused to disrupt established content industry business arrangements, then private citizens shouldn't be allowed to own/control this technology).

This issue is really not about partisanship, but about the knowledge and experience of individual policy makers. In Canada we had a major shift in our leftmost elected party (the NDP) with their Heritage critic changing from a playwrite to an independent musician. The playwrite held the line that technologies or business models that disrupted established content industry arrangements should be regulated away, while Mr. Angus recognizes the value both of new technologies and new business models for creators and the general public.

I will be interested to see what the thinking is of some of the newer additions to the US government.

This article by Yuval Dror includes:

The U.S. is one of the world's most zealous protectors of its citizens' intellectual property. But this American zealotry has recently crossed the line into fundamentalism. At the urging of American record and film companies - some of the wealthiest U.S. corporations, which donate millions of dollars to politicians - the U.S. enacted draconian laws that have no parallel elsewhere in the world, whose sole goal is to supply protection that borders on the absurd to cultural works that