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Is Bill C-11 related to SOPA/PIPA?

Probably the claim you will read most often in recent weeks from my friendly archvillain Jason J Kee on his twitter feed is that, There is NO COMPARISON b/t #C11 & SOPA. While he is playing with words when he makes this claim, I think it is useful to discuss the narrow way in which he is correct as well as the ways he is trying to distract people from the similarities.

Faith-based support of anti-communication legislation

Today many have been raising awareness of USA's SOPA and PIPA. I thought I would back up a bit from those specific initiatives, and discuss just how far apart people are on this type of policy.

Are paywalls a Copyright issue?

We should answer the question of whether a paywall is a copyright issue, before we dive into the question of the importance of this question for the debate around the Paracopyright provisions in Bill C-11.

I am familiar with paywalls from the perspective of both a user and a provider of such services. I will offer two specific examples of paywalls to illustrate the issues.

Anti-competition everywhere in Canadian telecom/broadcast sectors.

I'm not a proud Canadian these days. It seems that everywhere I look I see some monopolist trying to wipe out free markets in Canada, and not enough government intervention to protect the market. There are individuals in the current cabinet who appear on the surface to share some ideas, but who are sending mixed messages. I also don't get the impression that there is enough support elsewhere in cabinet, with other parliamentarians and parties, or with the larger bureaucracy who should be working for us.

My participation in the Digital Economy Consultation

The deadline for ideas and submissions on Canada’s digital economy strategy has been extended until midnight, Tuesday, July 13

I don't think I will have the time to make a formal submission. I have instead started to post to the ideas forum. If you agree with these ideas, please vote them up. Please also add comments.

My impressions of the DyscultureD Canadian audio blog

I am a big fan of audio blogs. Some people call them Podcasts because Apple iPod users seem to claim responsibility for making them popular. Leo Laporte over at TWIT.tv, a large audio/video blogging network with a long history in broadcasting, tried to convince people to call them Netcasts as they were simply broadcasting over the Internet. While I'm a listener to a few TWIT.tv shows, and a few other non-Canadian shows, I have always been looking for Canadian shows that cover some of the technology and political stories from the uniquely Canadian perspective.

Don’t Blame Google

In an article for The Mark I suggest that we shouldn't blame Google when music blogs are shut down, since it’s the major record labels that are to blame.

Intellectual Property Office of Environment Canada shuts down critics site?

According to a Hearst Seattle Media blog article, Mike Landreville, an advisor in the Intellectual Property Office of Environment Canada sent a letter to German Internet Service Provider (ISP) Serveloft requesting that the sites "enviro-canada.ca" and "ec-gc.ca" be removed. Without any judicial oversight of any alleged infringement claim (not that I can think of any legitimate claim for these spoof/paridy sites), the ISP shut off the range of IP addresses that served those sites as well as 4,500 other Web sites that had nothing to do with the spoof.

Whatever you think of the prank/spoof, this is obviously over-reaching by a Environment Canada bureaucrat and incompetence on the part of an ISP who removes websites due to random requests. This might be another Hoax given the claims originated from the Yes Men, but this would not have been the first time an ISP shut down an IP address range without judicial oversight based on a letter from someone alleging to be a lawyer.

Debate on spam became innovation agenda discussion

Charlie Angus was in full force yesterday. He took his contribution to the debate on Bill C-27 (often called the anti-SPAM bill, although it still contains anti-malware and other provisions as well), and spoke about it as one part of a larger digital agenda.

The full debate is available via Hansard, but I wanted to highlight a specific section of Mr. Angus' contributions. (Note: Debate resumes after C-50, which may be today or later.)

CRTC claims transparency sufficient in an anti-competative marketplace

A CRTC press release from the CRTC seems to indicate that they didn't understand the traffic management issue before them. While they separate retail and wholesale in name, they don't in policy. They did not separate the phone and cable companies which see the Internet as a competative threat to their legacy services from the ISPs who seek to offer Internet services.

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