Digital Copyright Canada

An article by Pauline Tam in todays Ottawa Citizen seems to be pressing for a general relaxation of the requirments for search warrant.

The article having the title of "Fake IDs used to defraud health system" discusses the efforts made to locate folks who use Canada's Health care system, ththough they are not entitled to benifits from the system. However the article seems to also attempt to persuade the reader that Canada's Privacy Laws are so strong, that they hamstring attempts by Law enforcement to investigate this sort of case.

An article by Mark Drajem for Bloomberg documents how Google joined others in opposing the invalidly titled "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" in testimony before the Commerce Department in Washington on Monday.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Press release on EssentialAction.org

September 15, 2008

**Secret Counterfeiting Treaty Must Be Made Public, Global Organizations Say**

More than 100 public interest organizations from around the world today called on officials from the countries negotiating Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – Canada, the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand -- to publish immediately the draft text of the agreement.

David Kravets offers an interesting judgement of a US 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who seemed to think his colleagues were to lenient on a defendant found guilty of selling counterfeited "access cards" that allowed customers unlawful access to DirectTV's digital satellite feed.

I also seriously doubt the access cards were counterfeit, as most of the people purchasing these know the origins and contents of what they are buying, and there is not often any attempt to deceive customers that they are from DirectTV.

I have had a Google Alerts for Dan McTeague for a few months, since I heard he was promoting a form of policy counterfeiting by confusing counterfeiting, commercial copyright piracy, non-commercial illegal sharing, patent, trademark, and other quite different areas of law. Most of the alerts talk about gas prices, and how he believes they should be lower.

This got me to thinking about the parallels between energy policy and copyright policy, and how Mr. McTeague, MP for Pickering-Scarborough East and the Liberal Consumer Affairs Critic, seems to not yet have an adequate understanding of these issues.

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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.

An article by James Love in the Huffington Post talks about the "Counterfeit treaty". This is meant in two ways: one, that this is a treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Since the name of the treaty masks the contents of the agreement which largely has nothing to do with counterfeiting, this dishonest misrepresentation of the contents can itself be considered a form of counterfeiting.

It's a busy week in the Hill Times this week with several items dealing with copyright.

Perrin Beatty,president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. has his version of FUD here.

Michael Eisen, chief legal officer at Microsoft Canada based in Toronto, spreads his disinformation here.

Brodie Fenlon has an article in the Globe and Mail discussing the activities of the "Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network", and the fact that they are deliberately coflating non-controvercial issues like enforcement of counterfeiting that leads to safety problems, and highly controvercial things such as Digital Rights Management and policies that would seek to protect the old economy from legitimate competition from the new economy.

William New of IP-Watch writes about a pact discussed yesterday in Question Period (Video, Hansard). Please read articles from Howard Knopf and Michael Geist, a press release from Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and an information page on the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada website.