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.

For those who did not know, Access Copyright, which represents a limited subset set of Canadian creators and publishers, has proposed (and will likely be granted) a yearly per-student fee for the use of photocopiers by schools. This increase will set the rate to $45 for Universities, and $35 for other educational institution, multiplied by the full time equivalents (FTE). (For details, read this PDF)

I have some sympathy for the economic situation these organizations find themselves in.
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While I have this sympathy, I don't see what this has to do with Copyright.

Read Full article on IT World Canada's blog...

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:

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 :

I read this article in Wired today. What blew me away most about it had nothing to do with yet-another-round-of-legal-shenanigans that the article was about. Rather, it was the quoted 30 million unique users per month that ISOHunt.com enjoys.

I'm one of the few people I know that has much respect for copyright. I oppose excessive forms of copyright as I recognise that the more disrespectful copyright becomes, the more people will disrespect it.

This afternoon I came across the following tweet:

TJ Hilton: Limewire owes $1 billion+, BP owes $69 million. Because sharing music is 14.5x more damaging than catastrophic spills. http://bit.ly/aEoZRR

The new bill is now on the order paper. Like Bill C-61, and unlike previous Liberal bills, it will be tabled by the Minister of Industry rather than the Minister of Heritage.

Globe and Mail article by Erin Anderssen discusses how parents talk to their children about copyright infringement.

I received an e-mail message from Erin about this story. While we didn't arrange an interview, the following is what I wrote to her in an e-mail.

I just wanted to point to a cool feature of the OpenParliament website. You can search for a term (Example: Copyright) and it finds the usage and shows you in an easy interface. In fact, I'm noticing the site coming up often in my Google Alerts.

This one on Charlie Angus, "Copyright" on May 11th, 2010 came in this morning.