Digital Copyright Canada

Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid has posted a 3 part interview (Part 1,Part 2,Part 3)with me discussing Copyright and Bill C-32.

On August 14'th I gave a presentation on legal protection for technological measures, and why this policy doesn't fit well within Copyright law (Slides, link to audio recording)

Summary: The types of activities which copyright regulates all assume that you already have access to content. Copyright never concerned itself with concept of access, which was left to other laws.

Technical measures can restrict access, but can't in the real world directly restrict the types of activities that copyright regulates.

Copyright and technical measures are disjoint, but technical measures and other areas of law such as contract and e-commerce overlap.

Is technology useful for stopping an authorized person from doing things which Copyright regulates? Should we radically change "Copyright" to address this problem, or is this a non-Copyright issue?

I was thinking about the recent DMCA rulemaking in the US, which led me to this "simple guide to copyright".

You can legally do pretty much anything you like with your own property,

unless it's a "fixation" of a copyrighted work and what you want do is a right granted to the rightsholder,

unless it's covered by one of the "fair dealing" exceptions.

That's not too bad. Of course, in the US, or in Canada if C-32 passes as-is, you need to add a couple more lines:

2010-06-11: I sent a letter this afternoon to my Member of Provincial parliament for Ottawa South, who happens to be Premier Dalton McGuinty. I copied it to my federal MP, as well as to Andrea Horwath, Leader of Ontario’s New Democrats, and Tim Hudak, Leader of the Ontario PC Party.

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Update 2010-07-29: I have sent an additional letter to Mr. McGuinty.

Thank you for your letter of July 27, 2010, in response to the letter I sent on June 11, 20101. I hope that you will reconsider the response, which was to say that it would be inappropriate for you to comment on a federal piece of legislation.

I forgot to include a link to the FAQ on why I disagree with what CMEC has been asking for.

Interesting statistics from Copyright and Technology Blog :

[...] academic research into DRM and other rights technologies in the United States has diminished to virtually nil.

(For example, a search of IEEE shows that of all digital rights-related research papers published from 2008 to the present, 40% were from China, 27% were from the rest of Asia, 20% were from Europe, and less than 4% were from the United States. Spain by itself had more activity than the US.)

I was thinking about this last night after reading another "but we have to have the C-32 approach to TPMs for the creators to get paid" article, and think I found a way to explain my thinking.

Let's divide Canadians into 4 groups based on their ability to bypass TPMs and their respect for copyright law :

	Can bypass TPMs	Can't bypass TPMs
Respect Copyright law	Engineers	Comsumers
Don't respect copyright law	Pirates	Wannabe pirates

A CBC News article documents yet another failed attempt to misapply technology to solve unrelated legal issue. I only wish this government would do evidence based policy, and look at when specific technologies have failed to solve legal problems elsewhere (IE: access controls in copyright in the USA has been a failure, and yet a far worse version is in Bill C-32). In the case of DMCA TPMs it wasn't a small sample, but a failed experiment committed against the entire country.

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.

• Protect end-to-end design principle in new communications technology.
  
• Regulate usage of technology in the correct laws
  
• Protect Information Technology property rights
  
• Adopt policy similar to 1991 EU directive on computer programs
  
• Improve competition policy, promotion and enforcement
  

Author, broadcaster, editor, journalist, musician, negotiator, singer, and MP Charlie Angus has released a letter to Heritage Minister James Moore discussing how the Minister has his facts wrong on Copyright.

It is great that we have an actual creator in parliament, able to speak on behalf of fellow creators, rather than too many parliamentarians that get confused by intermediaries falsely claiming to represent creators!

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.