Digital Copyright Canada

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a scientific institute of the European Commission, released a report with a familiar message: illegal music downloads aren't a substitute for legal music downloads. While I believe this type of research is critical to debunk the outrageous claims about the economic harm abused to justify backward policy choices, I don't think economic impact alone is the entire story.

If someone broke into our home and did not take anything, only rummaged through our belongings (possibly taking pictures, etc), we would still feel violated. Integral to home ownership is the right to decide who can enter our homes, and our privacy and property rights are violated even if nothing was taken or damaged, and there was no economic impact.

January 1'st each year we morbidly celebrate the death of authors and other creative persons. Flaws in the law mean the expiry of the copyright monopoly, and works finally entering the public domain to the enrichment of all humanity, is most often calculated from the year of a creative person's death.

Wallace J.McLean, Meera Nair and Michael Geist all blogged about the celebration.

Sometimes the feedback you receive from writing is unexpected, as happened with Andrei Mincov's feedback on twitter about yesterdays article: Why do we have copyright?.

He didn't offer feedback on the focus of the article, which makes sense given Mr. Mincov provided a good tool to determining which of two different answers to the "why copyright" question we each might give. What I found interesting was his response to the second half which documented how it was the protection of the rights of technology owners that caused my increased interest in copyright law.

Two forms of government manipulation of the marketplace have become the most controversial aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for Canadians: supply management and statutory knowledge monopolies. Each are government interventions in the marketplace between producers and consumers, each have a stated public policy purpose, and each are controversial.