Digital Copyright Canada

A Wired article by David Kravets discusses the USA's new Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel, and a “Joint Strategic Plan” concerning intellectual property enforcement. Comments so far have suggested the new Copyright Czar is more balanced with competing copyright holder interests than what we have otherwise heard coming out of the USA in the last decade and a half.

Just a quick note that the US Library of Congress requested permission, and I accepted the request, to have this website archived by them. The Creative Commons license for the content of this site already granted them and others clear permission to do this.

URL: www.digital-copyright.ca
Collection: Legal Blawgs
Acceptance to archive Web site
Acceptance to provide offsite access

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".