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Copyright.

Geist to blame for loss of HNIC theme? What?

This weekend's blog entry on creatorscopyright.ca by Christopher Moore comments on the recent cancellation of the Hockey Night In Canada theme song by CBC. Unfortunately it puts so much political spin into the issue as to make even the likes of David Frum dizzy.

Copyright must restore its moral credibility

An article by Lorraine Chan for UBC Public Affairs quotes Sundara Rajan (Canada Research Chair in Intellectual Property Law and an Associate Professor at UBC’s Faculty of Law) as saying:

“The only way for copyright to work is to restore its moral credibility. People need to feel it’s important to respect the rights of authors and artists, and to protect their work.”

RCMP helps mis-named Anti-Counterfeiting Network in propaganda campaign

Please see the Government of Canada press release: A Cross-Canada Educational Initiative to Raise Awareness and Combat Product Counterfeiting and Copyright Piracy.

The Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network (CACN) is a lobby group with an extremely biased special interest opinion on this area of policy. The entertainment lobby (entertainment software, movies, music) are carrying out a misinformation campaign trying to equate non-profit illegal knowledge sharing by citizens, commercial copyright infringement (piracy) and counterfeiting -- policy areas that are quite distinct, and cannot be rationally merged. Given this, they will be incapable of carrying out an educational roll, as necessary as we all agree this education is.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice sidesteps question on counterfeit treaty and Copyright bill

If you look up counterfeit in Wikipedia it starts with, "A counterfeiting is an imitation that is made usually with the intent to deceptively represent its content or origins." What would you call a treaty that is being negotiated in secret, needed a Wikileaks leak to get past the fact that Access to Information requests were getting blacked out pages, is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and yet has contents which have little to nothing to do with counterfeiting?

I think we have a treaty where its very title seems to have the intent to deceptively represent its content and origins.

Within parliament we appear to have a member that is trying to get at the truth about this government counterfeiting. Charlie Angus, the NDP's digital issues critic and the sitting MP that seems to best understand digital issues, had yet another exchange with the Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. This exchange included this counterfeit treaty and the fact the Copyright bill was not to be tabled today.

Read the rest of this entry on IT World Canada's BLOG »

The Unofficial Canadian DMCA Background Document

Please read Michael Geist's summary and predictions around the expected tabling of the Canadian DMCA on Wednesday.

Superman Charity vs. Kryptonite Inc.

Thomas Denton wanted to raise money for cancer. He did so by enlisting the services of several professional and amateur comic book artists, who drew original artworks featuring famous DC comic book heros, then selling them on Ebay with the proceeds to go to the charity.

But just how wrong was he to do this without the permission of the super hero copyright holders? I argue on DeathByCopyright.ca that he was not at all wrong.

Copyright in the mainstream media

It's good to see that the copyright issue is still on the radar of the mainstream media. Such coverage will be very important if the coming legislation is going to be as bad as many expect.

Chris Brand was quoted in today's Vancouver Sun on the issue. Way to go Chris!

Content industry vs content delivery providers: who is the customer?

One of the common problems you will see in policy discussions is that many people are focused on their narrow issues, sometimes even tiny edge-cases, and not investing any time looking at the bigger picture of how different policies interact. This leads to the solutions to these edge cases sometimes causing even worse problems for the proponents.

We had one of those moments at CopyCamp when I tried to demonstrate a bigger picture issue by adding in "Net Neutrality" related discussions into a narrow discussion of business models for authors.

Read full article on IT World Canada »

BBC not as fair as once thought

I came across an interesting article today discussing how the BBC has forced a knitter to take instructions down from her website because of alleged copyright violations. Not for selling knitted objects which resemble BBC characters, not even for the pictures of the creations she made, but for instructions which tell other knitters how to make their own creations in the form of these BBC characters.

Shuttleworth sponsors copyright probe

An ITWeb article by Leon Engelbrecht starts:

[Johannesburg, 6 May 2008 ] - The Shuttleworth Foundation and the Canadian International Development Research Centre will, for the next two years, fund research in eight African countries on the relationship between copyright and education.

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